When marketing your brand, it’s obvious that you want to cast as wide a net as you can, to reach as many potential customers as possible. However, if a marketing campaign is too generalised, it will fail to connect with anyone at all. It’s important to know your audience then, so you can truly connect with the people who will appreciate your brand. But how do you optimise your marketing for the customer-base you’ll most want to target? It’s a tough thing to handle and there are many variables to consider, so let’s explore the subject in more detail.
There are a number of reasons to market more directly to a specific customer base, rather marketing to a general one. It’s a great way to construct a more reliable customer-base by identifying who is the most likely to benefit the most from your products or services. It also allows you to optimise their experience and maintain customer satisfaction, while providing a reliable metric you can use to inform the future direction of your business.
Identifying a specific customer base aids in fostering customer loyalty, which in turn reduces customer churn. This is a term that describes the percentage of customers that have stopped using your product or service in a specific time frame. Through identifying the right customers, you can better serve their needs and keep them on board. This helps lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC), the cost related to acquiring a new customer, which gives you space to spend money elsewhere.
You’re probably already aware of the basic ways we identify groups of customers. You start by taking a look at their demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural attributes. Each of these allow you to paint a basic picture of the expectations and interests of the customer type you’re targeting. Demographic data includes a person’s age, gender, job and education while their geographic data concerns their location, and thus their cultural expectations. Their psychographic traits, on the other hand, have more to do with their lifestyle, goals and values and their behavioural characteristics tell us how these attributes have informed their actions, such as their engagement, purchasing history and customer loyalty.
These attributes are merely the beginning of constructing a detailed understanding of your customer base, however. A lot more goes into building concrete data that puts you ahead of the competition. Consider, for example, creating a customer journey map. This is a guide to every touchpoint a customer must pass through to achieve a goal with your company. By understanding your customer’s journey, you can better understand your customer and how to reach them.
Another way to gain a broader conception of your customers is to construct personas: semi-fictional archetypes that represent key traits of a significant audience segment. These allow you to know your customers as three-dimensional people instead of simple statistics, and make it easier to get into their headspace. You can take these a step further by paying attention to your website traffic data, and incorporating what you find into the personas.
By combining the data you receive through customer analytics with that you receive directly from engaging with customers themselves, an even more detailed image of your base can be constructed. The latter can be gathered through customer feedback, and by discussing their experience with them directly. By taking real-time data and bolstering your customer personas with it, you can create a more accurate image of your base than ever before
Once you’ve created this detailed understanding of your base, what tools can you use to reach your customers? Well, there are a number of approaches you can take, including targeted email campaigns. These will allow you to reach a customer directly instead of them coming to you, and as such is a valuable way of promoting your brand. You can also direct different customers to specific landing pages, which can be designed with their demographic or persona in mind. By doing so, you can show how your product or services are suited to their needs in particular, even if they have applications outside just their niche.
Social media is also a valuable medium you can use to this end. Different social media platforms have different demographics; Facebook has the oldest user base while TikTok has the youngest, and LinkedIn is a platform exclusively used by businesspeople. By using these demographics as a jumping-off point, you can begin to construct a bespoke marketing campaign for the customer type you’re looking for. From here you can even direct them towards a landing page that can meet their even-more-specific needs.
Truly understanding your customer is a process that takes time, but it’s more than worth it. Hopefully this blog has helped enlighten you in that regard, and you’re on your way to developing a more in-depth perspective than ever before.
If you need a marketing campaign that can target the customer base you’re looking for, then why not get in touch? We’d be glad to help!