When it comes to digital marketing, it's essential to identify and segment your target audience in order to determine the creative message that will resonate with them and the channels they prefer. Your target audience may be niche or wide, depending on what you're selling. For example, if you were a shoe seller, your target audience would be wide, since men, women and children wear shoes. On the other hand, you might specifically sell high-performance running shoes, so your target audience would be more specific: elite athletes between 20 and 40 years old who have expressed an interest in running or have run a marathon.
It's important to be specific when determining who your audience is and who is not. Knowing this will prevent your teams from spending advertising money on segments that won't generate profits. Knowing who you're talking to and why you're talking to them is the start of any successful digital marketing campaign. It all starts by defining your target audience and talking only to them.
A target audience is a subset of people who share a set of common characteristics with whom they are most likely to buy your product. This may consist of their age, gender, location, interests, etc. Your job is to find out who that is. In-market audiences take like-minded audiences to the next level.
It involves targeting those who are already on the way to completing a purchase. It's especially useful to segment these high-value customers because they're much more likely to convert. Gaining a deep understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you define a more qualified audience. Only then can you use digital channels to reach that audience and drive higher-quality traffic, improve site engagement, and most importantly, increase sales. Digital marketing is often compared to inbound marketing, but it doesn't differentiate between “inbound” and “outbound” methods. Customer analysis should lead to an understanding of a real person, a typical segment representative, not an abstract description of the target audience.
You can use all of the digital marketing tactics listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. The more accurate a target audience is, the better a company can advertise and market to this population, and the more conversions it will experience. The good thing about digital marketing is that it allows you to make decisions based on real time data rather than assumptions and opinions. An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to track all your sales to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your business. Whether you're a small business or a larger company focused on performance marketing campaigns, you're sure to reap the benefits of focusing on certain audience groups. In the digital marketing industry, the sales funnel is one of the basics that can take your business from the unknown to a multi-billion dollar marketing machine. Marketing analytics platforms, such as the Marketing Attribution and Measurement Platform, can help you identify which outlets are frequenting your target audiences or TV shows they watch. Today, I'll walk you through eight tried and true audience segmentation strategies straight from the minds of digital marketers.
Inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, attract and delight customers online. The best digital marketers have a clear idea of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overall objectives. Digital marketing allows you to identify and target a highly specific audience and send them personalized high-converting marketing messages.
