Right Messaging for the Right Audience

Do you know various enterprises provide perfect products and services but simply can’t succeed? It’s because their content doesn’t reach the proper audience. No matter how engaging it is. Often content is aligned to appeal to everyone, which leads to lower conversion rates and a waste of time and resources. Social media platforms are constantly evolving, with larger audiences and more integrated features. Establishing a target audience is a critical step in making sure the correct tone and messaging techniques are being used during your campaigns. Based on your product or services various factors come into play while defining your target audience. 

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Income
• Education
• Occupation

Every Brand Has a Personality

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, "Branding is what people say about you when you're not in the room." Brand personality is part of how consumers perceive the brand and how the brand differentiates itself from the competition. Accurately understanding brand personality is important to brand success. Understanding brand personality also helps select the most appropriate message and media, or more effective and suitable sponsorships or partnerships. A brand personality enables the brand owner to deliver a consistent brand experience that connects with consumers and leaves a deeper and more sustainable impression.

Define Your Target Market Through Segmentation

Market segmentation can help you understand how you target your products or services to appeal to specific people within your target market. By selecting different target audiences, and focusing on the portion of the people who would be most interested in your products or services, you are allowing yourself to communicate and engage with that segment more personally.

Market segmentation can be divided into the following categories:

• Geographic
• Demographic
• Behavioral

Let’s take a look at each of these categories in more depth.

Geographic

Geo-targeting refers to the practice of delivering content based on the visitor’s geographic location. It can be as simple as a ZIP code to specific geographic coordinates. Geo-targeting is a marketing technique in which ads, content, and campaigns are tailored to potential customers based on their geographic location to deliver location-specific experiences. Marketers can choose to target specific cities, states, countries, or even whole continents (just be mindful of language barriers when targeting larger regions).

Demographic

One of the main advantages of demographic segmentation is that the information you need is readily available for you. You can pull census data to determine who, where, and how you want to market your product. For example, automobile industries can market their cars to different age groups, income levels, and genders. The most commonly used demographic parameters include:

• Age
• Gender
• Family size
• Household income
• Occupation
• Level of education
• Religion
• Race
• Nationality

A demographic profile can be used to determine when and where advertising should be placed to achieve maximum results. In all such cases, the advertiser must get the most results for their money, and so careful research is done to match the demographic profile of the target market to the demographic profile of the advertising medium.

Behavioral

Behavioral segmentation studies the behavior of consumers towards a product or service; this consists of different variables that are studied by marketers to accordingly devise a market strategy. Based on the particular requirement of the market, behavioral segmentation is divided into variables

• Brand loyalty
• Benefit sought
• Readiness to buy/purchase
• Usage-based segmentation

Take a Step Further with Psychographic Targeting

Psychographics is the study of consumer interests, lifestyles, likes, dislikes, and is often combined with geographic, demographic, and behavioral information to create a detailed consumer profile. Thanks to social media, marketers can now use psychographic targeting to target their marketing messages in a highly specific and targeted manner. The beauty of psychographic targeting is that you can get as specific as you want. For instance, someone who just vented about wanting a vacation who shares pictures of beaches in California might be served with ads about a limited period offer on a trip to California. Psychographic targeting using information from social media channels can help marketers with layers and layers of information needed for accurate customer profiling.

Here are the following main Psychographic Factors as defined by HubSpot:

• Personality characteristics
• Lifestyle
• Social class
• Attitudes
• Principles and beliefs
• Activities and interests

Now that we have covered various factors and categories by which your market segmentation can be defined, let’s now move towards a few simple tactics that will allow you to target the right audience:

Create Buyer Personas

HubSpot says, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” You need to map out your buyer personas based on what is important to them. Create an incredibly detailed storyline surrounding your buyer persona and what this person’s motivations are. The more detail you include, the more likely you will be to target this specific audience while you put in place your brand strategy.

Analyze Your Client Base

What factors are making your clients buy from you? Which is the feature demanded most by your customers? What products do they buy from the competition? Which competitor is on the top of their minds? These are important questions that need to be answered to figure out what is working and what isn’t. They are even more important if you are from a small business environment. Customer analysis can help you identify why someone is your customer and thereby improve the segmentation targeting and positioning process. Remember – 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers. You must know who those customers can be.

Social Media Feedback

What better way to get crucial feedback than social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are effective ways of surveying your target audience. Customers today are turning towards social media platforms to let companies know exactly what they thought of their experience. According to a recent study carried out by Conversocial, 43% of customers expect social channels to be integrated with other customer service channels.

In Conclusion

Marketers today are under pressure to create a premium, personalized experience across a dynamic and growing number of customer channels. The opportunity is immense, but only if you can consistently target the right audience, at the right time with the right message across those channels. Across these channels, it can be difficult to target the most interested and qualified audience, since what works with one audience may not work with another. To optimize marketing efficiency and performance marketers need to have a blueprint for defining the optimal audience as well as the perfect message to go along with it.