What if you knew exactly what your audience wanted, before they even knew for themselves? The technology is getting there. With the advent of audience targeting, pinpointing your customers by segment is only a matter of collecting and analyzing data (admittedly, really a lot of it).
So why is audience targeting important? Without having a clear understanding of exactly what kind of information or content is going to resonate with your likely customers is a bit like getting in your car without a determined destination. That may have been fun when you were a teenager cruising around with your friends, but when you're a Marketing Director trying to stay on-budget, it's a terrible waste of resources. With no specific goal, you're strategies are not focused, and the results are not measurable. In the marketing world, this is a good recipe for your boss making a case to cut the marketing budget: huge output of resources with little to no proof of ROI.
"I want to rank first on Google."
"I want 20 content-driven leads a week."
"I want to close 15 sales a month."
Those may be tangible goals, but they won't be repeatable if you don't track exactly what got you your successes. The underlying metric is the same: to reach your audience. But in these three examples, we're talking about customers in very different stages of familiarity with your product or service.
"I want to rank first on Google."
This is a goal targeted towards the customers that have never heard of you. It's for people in the exploratory phase of their buying cycle, who just want to see what's in the market. Ranking first in a search engine provides brand authority, in addition to giving you brand visibility that sticks with the consumer.
"I want 20 content-driven leads a week."
These leads are going to be customers familiar with your website, who haven't quite bitten off on a full demo or trial. They're interested in what you're saying, and raising a hand to indicate they might want to hear more.
"I want to close 15 sales a month."
To get this far down the funnel, you'll have to know metrics like the average sales cycle to really gauge how realistic this is. How can you keep closing sales if you aren't intimately familiar with how to move your customer through the buying cycle?
The answer lies in personalized, timely content marketing. It's not personalized per customer, of course, as that would be impossible. The resource spend alone would bankrupt you. Instead, however, using 1:1 marketing strategies makes your customers feel like you are actually tailoring your marketing plan just to their interests and desires. This is key when your end game is an emotion-based process, such as sales.
At every part of the buyer journey, your potential customer is going to want to see something different. You wouldn't hit your latest closed sale with a "Get a Free Trial!" mass email, and you wouldn't send a "Listen to our new podcast" email to someone who just listened to that same podcast. Doing either of these things represents examples of automation fails. They are signals to your customers that you haven't quite mastered your marketing game.
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Understanding your audience is a strong way to guide and inform every step of your complete, integrated marketing campaign. By determine how your customers act during each stage of the buyer journey, you can target them with marketin assets that will cause them to move down the sales funnel. Instead of mass targeting potential customers and loyal brand evangelists with the same generic messaging, now you can pinpoint your audience through segmentation, crafting unique content and assets that move customers down the sales funnel.
By getting the right message to the right people at the right time, you can build a reliable, scalable, and successful sales model. To answer the question posed by the title of this post: Audience targeting is an invaluable tool that, when deployed correctly, is extremely effective.