Marketing is an integral part of the success of any business. It’s believed that marketing returns can raise your business revenues by over 20%, so don’t take its importance lightly. Having targeted marketing campaigns can also do wonders as it helps in reaching out to the kind of customers that are supposed to buy your products. However, marketing needs expertise, experience, and learning of the market’s dynamics and trends.
The business world and the needs of customers change, so you have to be aware of what your customers want, how it can reach them, and when it should get to them. Your marketing team needs to possess the right skills to leverage all avenues of marketing such as social media, your website, influencer websites, mobile applications, targeted emails, print media, and video marketing, among others.
To help you personalize your marketing efforts, here are some strategies that can help:
1. Start With Market Research
You need to understand the kind of marketing you’re venturing into. Take your time to do deep and extensive research of your industry. Answer the following questions:
- What are the customer purchasing trends?
- Is the market growing or is it on a decline?
- Will your products be for luxury or basic?
- What will you add to your product that’s different from your competitors?
You can research online what your competitors are doing, their advertising methods, and how they reach their clients. In case your market doesn’t have competitors, research markets outside your area, city, or even country. Also, you can use questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and surveys. The more data you gather, the better for you.
Market knowledge will help and instruct how you develop your website, mobile application, and the kind of information to put in them. Your marketing efforts should be directed in the digital space and with a budget for it, so let your IT team develop a website and an app for you. Instead of creating them from scratch, you can use open source CRM which speeds the work as you only need to improve on the source code to fit into your business needs.
2. Know Your Target Audience Demographics
Demographics refers to your ideal customers bound to buy your products. Your products might not be meant for use by everyone. Having a certain demographic helps your campaign to be cost-effective. You can identify your target audience by:
- Studying the customer base of your competitors.
- Analyzing your present clients.
- Creating buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a profile of a fake person which may include the buyer’s name, their educational level, where they live, their gender, their hobbies, values and behaviors, profession, civil status, and family, among others.
3. Align Your Marketing With Your Research
Creating a persona for your ideal customer means you’ve gathered enough data that can help you align everything around the client. This should be captured in your advertising efforts such as web designing, automation, and focused strategy of your demographic. You may use these guidelines:
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Setting Your Goals
Your marketing efforts might achieve your desires if you put some real and actionable goals. What would you like to achieve with clickthrough rates, conversions, and sales? At times, setting goals might be a challenge. But with the use of the S.M.A.R.T tool, you can come up with focused goals much faster. This acronym denotes:
S – Specific: Your goals should be specific.
M – Measurable: Your set goals should be measured so you can know your progress.
A – Attainable: Don’t set unachievable goals. Let them be realistic.
R – Relevant: Your goals should be matching your market and the needs of your customers.
T – Timely: Give yourself a time frame in which you’d attain your goals.
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Personalization
Your marketing ads and emails have to be tailored with your audience in mind. In case you’ve never done this before, you need to hire an expert to do the work for you. Marketing professionals can help you come up with images, tone, voice, and a strategy that appeals to your targeted demographic. You need to go where your audience is found in the online space.
For instance, if you intend to reach Gen-Z, it might be a waste of time and resources trying to use emails. Rather, leveraging social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram might be the strategy. On the other hand, if you intend to reach ladies and young girls, using visuals and ads with attractive colors may be best for you.
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Automate Your Marketing
With your target audience in mind, you can automate your processes so you can be more effective. Automation can help you schedule your posts to be sent at certain times. Identify the time your audience is likely to be more active on social media so you can post at that time.
Also, with automated email marketing software, you can send your emails on the days or times when they’re more likely to be read. Focus more on meeting the needs that your competitors aren’t meeting.
Automation is critical in helping you manage your time well. In case you don’t have automation software, it might be high time that you purchase one for stellar marketing strategies.
4. Have High-Quality Databases
Your personalization efforts will succeed with a good database. You can get the services of third-party providers for easy replacing and correcting inaccurate information. A third-party approach can help you come up with identity graphs and do intent monitoring for strong and efficient targeting.
5. Use The Person Pronoun ‘You’ And Customer’s First Name
During the creation of the client persona, you collected the names of your prospective client. Calling the name of your clients can help in capturing their attention so they can keep on reading your content.
A customer will feel like they’re the only person your email was sent to when you keep on addressing them as ‘you’ instead of being general with words such as ‘our customers’ or ‘our clients.’ Such terms can help you in advancing the level of your personalization.
Wrapping Up
Effective marketing puts into consideration the characteristics of the target audience. Research the demographics of your likely-to-be customers, know where you can reach them online, create personalized content, and leverage marketing automation for effectiveness.
