How well do you know your target audience? Most companies say that they know what kind of customers they’re trying to reach, but the reality is that their vision is far too broad. It’s not enough these days to define your audience just by where they live, or what their general age range might be.
In a competitive marketplace, the more specific you can get with your campaigns, the easier it will be to transform your marketing investments into genuine sales. If you jump into your advertising efforts without refining your customer personas first, you could be wasting cash on strategies that never generate results for your business. Instead, every marketing strategy should begin with a full evaluation of the customer journey, the kind of intent your audience might have when looking for you, and an insight into what they need from your marketing content.
Do You Know Your Customer’s Journey?
To identify whether you know your audience well enough to generate positive sales and outcomes from your campaigns, the first thing you need to do is try to map your audience’s journey. Ask yourself where your interactions with your customers start. Are you only targeting your audience once they know they have a problem that your service or product can fix? Or are you creating content for your website that attracts customers during the awareness and research stages too?
Knowing your customer’s journey from start to finish means that you can build a marketing strategy that leverages every kind of intent your audience might have. For instance, your blogs or news reports about your industry could target customers with an educational intent, who want to learn more about what’s happening in your space. Alternatively, your buying guides will target those who are further along in the customer journey, potentially considering the purchases they can make.
Having an idea of the different kinds of intents your customers have when they begin looking for you online can be a great way to optimize your website, and increase your chances of targeting the right kind of leads. You can even target your advertising campaigns specifically to concentrate on transactional users who are ready to buy your product, so your investment grows your business and not just traffic to the site.
Strengthening Your Buyer Personas
Many companies jump into marketing with a broad idea of the kind of customers they want to reach. Unfortunately, this often means that they end up attempting a range of different targeting strategies, and missing out on a huge number of sales. Creating a set of buyer personas that not only considers the different kinds of customers you might have but how you can speak to those clients at the different stages of their journey will increase your ROI significantly.
With a strong understanding of your audience and an insight into the power of intent, you can enhance your SEO strategy, and use it to drive traffic to your site at a rapid pace. More importantly, you won’t just be driving any traffic to your sales pages. Your efforts will be focused on the customers that can drive the most positive growth for your company.
