A marketing strategy has the potential to transform your business credentials, but it’s not a guaranteed game-changer.
Mistakes are common. To succeed, you have to create and deliver campaigns that work. Targeting the right people is one of the cornerstones of effective marketing.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to design and implement a targeted marketing strategy to boost your ROI.
5 Steps to Create A Targeted Marketing Strategy
Define your target customer
The first step is to define your target customer. Failing to determine who you are trying to attract is one of the basic marketing errors.
If you adopt a scatter-gun approach and try to reach huge audiences across multiple demographics, you run the risk of missing the mark and wasting huge sums of money.
Before you do anything else, decide who you want to sell your products or services to and start building a buyer profile.
It’s beneficial to provide as much detail as possible when creating your ideal customer profile. The more information you have, the more precise you can be when targeting key audiences.
It’s useful to gather data, such as income bands, age, gender, and profession, but your market research should go beyond surface details.
Crucial aspects to explore include what motivates people to buy from specific brands or choose certain products, which promotions are most impactful, how they shop and locate products and services, and how they like to connect with businesses.
Get to know your ideal customer
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer and have a comprehensive overview of who they are, the next step is to get to know them better.
Use strategies such as surveys, online polls, interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires to collect data. Set questions and polls based on what you want to know and use feedback to help you make decisions.
Social media is a brilliant platform for businesses looking to gather information about prospective customers and build relationships.
Although social apps and platforms have become effective sales and advertising channels, they’re incredibly valuable in terms of customer engagement and raising brand awareness.
Connecting with people via social media is a quick, easy and convenient way to gauge reactions, collect feedback and suggestions, and test out new ideas and different types of promotions and posts.
Focus on high-quality leads
When it comes to boosting ROI, lead quality is often more important than quantity.
There’s no point in driving huge volumes of traffic to your website or encouraging thousands of clicks if customers aren’t continuing through the sales funnel.
Focusing on high-quality leads can boost conversion rates and prevent you from wasting money on methods or channels that don’t work.
If you’re looking to narrow your focus and reach customers who have a genuine interest in your products or services, opt-in email marketing strategies are an excellent idea.
With this technique, you can send promotional emails, newsletters, special offers and information about your brand to people who have chosen to subscribe.
Opt-in email marketing doesn’t target customers who don’t want to hear from you. This means you’re not bothering clients who have already unsubscribed or spending money on marketing materials that won’t reach your target audience.
Top tips for effective opt-in email campaigns include offering incentives for subscribers, promoting subscriptions across popular channels, testing different CTAs and pop-ups and making the sign-up process quick and easy.
Another strategy you can use to pinpoint customers who are interested in your business is retargeting. Social media platforms enable you to post ads or follow up on previous interactions.
The aim is to remind the customer of the item sitting in their basket or lure them in with an offer that’s too good to miss.
Choose the right methods and channels
Choosing the right marketing methods and channels for your brand is another golden rule of successful marketing strategies.
If you make the wrong decisions, you’ll miss target audiences and spend more money on campaigns that don’t convert.
The best way to determine which platforms and techniques to use is to carry out extensive market research.
Find out more about how your ideal customers shop, access information about businesses, and find products or services.
Learn about which types of offers and promotions they respond to and how they search for companies. It’s also beneficial to consider key factors, such as age.
If you’re targeting young people who use search engines as the primary means to find businesses and buy products, and have numerous social media accounts and active email inboxes, for example, focusing on digital marketing is an excellent idea.
Choose the apps that are most popular and impactful among target customers, double down on SEO, ensure you have an attractive, mobile-friendly website with high-quality, optimised content, and build an email list.
In some cases, traditional marketing can be more effective. If you’re on a mission to target local customers within older demographics, for example, flyers, newspaper and magazine adverts and word-of-mouth may be more powerful.
If you have a varied client base, you can back conventional strategies with digital techniques. In this case, for example, you could use local SEO in addition to promotional flyers, mail, and local press adverts.
Studies show that over 80% of customers will either visit or contact a local business within 24 hours of doing a local search online.
Analyse performance
Analysing performance is an effective way to identify weaknesses, address pain points and develop your strategy to implement improvements and cater to changing trends. You can collect and analyse data across marketing campaigns to help you make decisions and optimise ROI.
It’s critical to establish key metrics based on your campaign objectives. Focus on useful data that will help you drive the business forward while improving customer experience and boosting sales.
In addition to analytics tools and software, you can also use customer feedback and reviews to gain insights.
Comments and suggestions from clients can be incredibly valuable, even when they’re not wholly positive. Use feedback to solve problems, develop your strategy and cater to customer preferences.
Marketing has the potential to supercharge sales and put brands on the map, but it doesn’t always deliver. One of the most critical elements to get right is designing a targeted strategy that reaches and impresses target customers.
Key steps to create a targeted marketing strategy include defining your ideal customer, getting to know them through market research and customer engagement, and focusing on high-quality leads. It’s also crucial to choose the right marketing methods and channels and analyse performance continuously.
