Get out your virtual bow and arrow to hit your target audience with a focused message and achieve your sales goals. Imagine audience targeting as the progressively focused concentric rings of a classic archery target with the bullseye at the center. Certain forms of advertising or marketing outlets can reach an often larger, broader audience on the outer ring, but get more focused on the center ring as the outlet narrows its reach or specifies the audience.
- Outer ring—Newspapers, TV, billboards. These typify the types of outlets that reach the broadest possible audience, in the case of television, or based on geographic reach, in the case of local newspapers or billboards. The reach is passive and cannot gauge the purchase intent of the viewing audience.
- Middle rings—Social media advertising, email marketing – Both platforms enable companies to share messages with highly relevant prospects and customers, and the resulting marketing engagement activity can be tracked and reported. But the audience receiving/seeing your message might not be ready to purchase your product/service.
- Internal ring—Search engine marketing can help achieve one of the most targeted methods of reaching potential customers, based on their active or immediate interest and intent. The goal of either a paid or organic search marketing strategy is to be found in search engine results when a prospect searches using keywords relevant to your business.
Our Cleveland digital marketing agency uses several tactics to help businesses target relevant audiences with tailored messages.
Social media
Marketers can take advantage of popular platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook to target prospects according to customer interest and demographics. No platform supplies quite as much in-depth customer information for B2B marketers as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn supplies multiple criteria companies can use to narrow their focus, with demographics about members’ ages and genders, education level, job titles and years of experience. It shares member interests and professional associations—fertile ground for finding the right target audience for your product or service.
Overall, social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook enable marketers to:
- Remarket based on a user’s past web and social media activity
- Tell a visual story with video and images
- Run lead capturing ads to collect user contact info within the platform.
Lead-capturing advertising helps build an internal address database of highly qualified prospects. Relevant email marketing campaigns can then further nurture and educate potential customers.
Email marketing
Growing a quality in-house email list is often a slow, long-term effort. Sources of quality contacts include tradeshows, website inquiries, and lead capturing social media campaigns. Email marketing is a great way for a prospect to get to know your company and culture, as well as your products and services.
Social media marketing is a good way to target a larger pool of prospects, but those platforms contain a lot of distractions and competition for your prospect’s attention. Once you have that email address, you can deliver relevant information straight to their inbox. Often it will take a series of attempts or emails to build rapport and to continue to attract their attention, and the in-house list allows this relationship building to continue.
Prospects are taking a big step when they trust a company enough to give them their contact information. One of the biggest mistakes companies often make after a live event or once emails are captured from advertising, is to allow too much of a time lapse before another contact is made.
Don’t just send out fluff or bombard prospects with too many messages either. Deliver worthwhile content, such as a case study that helps illustrate how your product can help solve common industry problems, testimonials from industry colleagues, valuable how-to tips, invitations to educational seminars, or short video demonstrations.
Search Engine Marketing
Having your company’s information presented to a prospect when they are actively searching for a solution is the ultimate marketing win. You want to be found when they are looking to purchase or looking for answers to a common problem.
This is best accomplished through Search Engine Marketing tactics:
- Paid Search: when you pay to appear on page one of a search engine results page
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): long-term efforts to optimize your website for keyword phrases
Learn more about our extensive experience with gaining page 1 search engine visibility for our Cleveland and other Ohio clients through Paid Search and SEO, or contact us to how our team can help you zero in on your target audience.
