View our tips for finding and reaching a target audience with your digital marketing campaign and building a buyer persona with demographics and psychographics.
When running a digital marketing campaign, you may not always be looking to reach the broadest audience possible. A small business or a specialty service may have a specific audience they’re trying to reach. In fact, reaching your target customer becomes even more important when your digital advertising budget is limited.
With that in mind, let’s go through some ideas you can use to optimize your digital marketing strategy to better reach the target audience for your business.
Know Your Target Market
The fact is, target audience insights will amplify the performance of your marketing efforts. Trying to reach any group of people takes work, but having demographic information (marital status, income level, psychographic data, etc.) can help identify where to focus your efforts to reach that ideal customer. Here are some tips you can use to identify your potential customers.
Look at what you’re offering
The first step to finding your target market is taking a look at what your business offers from the perspective of a new customer. What problem do your products solve? What needs do your services meet? By figuring out the needs of your clients, you can start to identify the type of buyer or user that would be seeking you out in the first place. The answers may not always be as clear cut as a pool cleaning service looking for people who can afford pools, but many of these steps involve narrowing the field until you hone in on as tight a target as possible.
Do your own market research
The next step takes you from trying to see your business from a potential customer’s perspective to collecting the perspectives of your current customers! Surveys, focus groups, and formal (or informal) in-person conversations with clients can give you some invaluable information on who you’ve been selling to, how they feel their needs are being met, and how you can address any pain points in the sales process. It also clues you in on the type of person that finds your goods or services valuable.
In addition, local demographic information including education level, income, health, internet usage, and household size is available at the U.S. Census Bureau’s site. This information, while general, can still help to give you a better feel for an area you’re doing business in or hope to do business in.
Another aspect of market research involves looking at your competition. Depending on your industry, going after the same niche audience in the same area of the country may leave both of you scrambling for customers. However, seeing how your competition is reaching out to their clients, the type of people they attract, and the market share they control can help inform your digital marketing efforts.
Sort potential customers into market segments
Market segmentation is the last step before your marketing campaign begins. Putting all of the information you’ve gathered together, you can organize potential customers into groups based on categories from demographic information or psychographic information.
Demographics refer to surface-level traits that groups of people may share: age, gender, income level, education level, etc. Psychographics deal with customers’ behaviors, personalities, values, and lifestyles. From this information, along with the customer surveys, you can start to build different buyer personas, an avatar of your ideal customer. Finding a group of real people who closely match your buyer persona is finding the market segments you need to target with marketing campaigns.
Custom Content Marketing
Reaching the right audience through social media marketing requires the right type of content. While there are seemingly limitless forms that “content” can take, here are three types that are popular (and useful for reaching new customers) at the moment:
Short-Form Video
As seen on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube shorts, clever, approachable, short-form videos are an eye-catching way to promote brand awareness. Extraordinary content can break through a noisy news feed and grab the attention of the viewer. This can be a challenging format to work in as finding the right balance between something memorable and something marketable within a tight time constraint can require knowledge of your audience as well as current trends to be successful. Get it right and you’ll often see a higher engagement than other forms of content.
Long Form Video
The long-form video is a charming intersection of entertainment and inspiration. As effective as short videos are at capturing attention, long videos excel at building a relationship with your audience. The longer format gives the additional time needed to establish your brand persona, forging a bond with like-minded individuals. Consider the example of an amusing, series-style cooking or craft demo that encourages audience engagement across each episode. A video series like this is a great way to reach potential customers.
Influencer
Another great targeting option is the use of influencers. Creating a partnership with an influencer on your chosen platform gives your brand a huge boost with that influencer’s existing audience allowing you to quickly build credibility and trust. It can also lead to win-win long-term relationships with that influencer!
A full series takeover that brings influencers in to talk and promote content and brand through a unique home kitchen/living room style environment is a great way to engage an audience.
Search Engine Optimization
While your current customers already know who you are as a business, you’ll want to be findable by potential customers scouring the internet. If they have a question about a product or service that you provide, you want to be the answer to their question! That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. One of the best ways to stretch your ad spend is by making sure the content on your site covers topics that your customers might be interested in or searching for.
There are tools such as Google Analytics and Google Ads that can help you optimize your content so the algorithm funnels people to your site, but even if you can’t appear on the front page for top searches on general topics in your field, there are going to be subjects that are specific to your business that, while they may not show a high search volume in the analytics, are still things your target audience is looking for. Being the top result for an incredibly specific search query can prove to be more valuable than being at the bottom of the first page results for a more common topic.
First Media really knows its audience
At First Media, we are dialed in with market segments that watch our content. That’s why we have better results! We offer professionally produced and visually captivating video content that gets mass reach and engagement through native integrations on our social marketing platforms.
Trends change in real-time and we keep up with the changing social media landscape. We are constantly exploring to generate a deep understanding of what works on each platform and why. Then we leverage our tech tools. With our AI Creative recommendation tool and our Comments Analysis Tool we analyze the results of your marketing plan to generate actionable insights.
Reach your audience at every stage with digital creative & performance marketing solutions from First Media!
