The Must-Do Targeted Marketing Activities (and the best type of people to do them)

Long before the pandemic and the current state of the economy, it was well understood that no business can afford to target everyone.

In this article, the Ideal Media team is sharing the key activities in targeted marketing and how your team can work together to reach the right customers at the right time.

About Targeted Marketing

Targeted marketing strategies work by breaking a market into segments and then concentrating marketing budget and brand messaging on only the segments that have the most potential buyers and customers whose needs most closely match your product or service offerings.

By prioritising a well-defined target market, you can reach potential clients and generate business in a much more affordable, efficient, and effective way. When using target marketing strategies and audience experiences they are also more effective at building brand awareness, loyalty and achieving better products and services. In fact, target marketing allows small businesses with a strong offering to effectively compete with much larger (and richer) companies.

Are you really doing targeted marketing?

Let's break it down in simple terms- if we all know that every person is unique, and therefore so are their professional, entertainment, clothing, transportation, sleep and diet needs then we would be crazy to take a "one-size-fits-all" strategy to advertise any product or service.

But so many businesses still say they target "anyone interested in my services." They miss the nuance that when you target a specific market segment, it doesn't mean that you are excluding people who do not fit your criteria. Simply put, "anyone" is far too general to effectively find the right customer and typically, businesses who fail to answer this question in a specific way probably hasn't done the key activities needed to effectively implement targeted marketing strategies.

What are the key activities in targeted marketing?

Defining and reaching out to your target market is both an art and a science- effective target marketing requires a team that has creativity, empathy, science and accountability on their side- Which is why the best examples of targeted marketing have been accomplished by businesses with diverse and talented teams that use business partnerships meaningfully to fill in any "gaps" that they may have.

Below, we've laid out a simple guide to the activities that are essential to an effective targeted marketing strategy and the qualities you need to look for each person in this activity.

Defining your target audience with buyer personas

A buyer persona, also called customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience.

Having well-defined customer personas that the entire team knows about is one of the most essential ingredients in effective target marketing. Although having this doesn't guarantee success, customer personas serve as the beacon light for the entire team- whether it be your marketing manager, your designer or whatever.

To create an effective buyer persona, it helps to describe someone in your existing customer database in "layman speak" - are you targetting small-business owners, homeowners, or stay-at-home moms? Perhaps you're looking for trendsetters. Armed with data, calling to mind the kind of customer and the type of scenario where your client's business becomes the hero is often an enjoyable and fruitful task.

Creative and empathetic thinkers excel in this arena. Don't forget that you need to have more analytical members of the team to empower the creative process through real data and numbers!

Compiling and analysing data on existing customers

Speaking of empowering the buyer persona process through data on your existing customers is an essential activity for any business that wants to serve their customers better and although most businesses know- or at least they think they know- the type of customer they serve, there is still a substantial amount of nuance that can be derived by combining your datasets with others made available by data suppliers.

This could mean things like combining your customer's purchasing habits alongside things like geographic, socio-economic and demographic profiling. Drawing correlations between these data sets mean you can identify the customers that get the most value from your services and those that may not.

For this activity, you need analytical and intellectually curious team members on your team that are armed with the right tools and a structured approach. They need to know where to get the data and what can be done with it. They also need to identify the additional datasets that will enrich their understanding of the customers who have purchased either their or similar products or services in the past.

Identifying consumers "look-alikes" of your best customers

Now that you have a pretty good idea of your target audience, the question is where can you find more people like your most valuable customers?

Creating a high-quality database of potential customers (not to mention keeping it up to date) truly is a labour of love. But it is well worth it because we know that when this job is done right, you get better results in every step of your marketing journey, including retention!

Because of the complex nature of this activity, you are best off finding resourceful and trustworthy partners that have the skills and resources to look at your current data to create a profile of clients in order to find "look-alikes" in the market place.

Our dedicated data team makes sure you’ll only ever get the most-up-to-date lists. So you can rest assured your work has the best chance of making a real impact.

Getting out there and sharing your message

As you identify your new leads the next step is to engage with your prospects and customers. This is when you really put real marketing dollars behind your strategy.

If your team members have done a good job of clearly defining your target audience, it will be much easier to determine both where and how to market your company to them.

To make sure your campaign gets the results your client expects, you need people that are both advertising savvy, creative and action-oriented.

These team members will not only need to be able to craft the email that makes the best impression when it arrives in that inbox, but they also need to be up to date on the latest developments across marketing channels.

Measuring the performance of your team efforts

Some business owners like to imply to the public that they just have the Midas Touch and that all of their success is the result of them following their natural intuition- but we all know that's rarely the case!

The "science" really shows through when your team rolls up their sleeves to validate how their efforts translate into real-world results.

Many people might think that the only qualification for this activity is to be structured and analytical, but in reality, the most important thing is for this person to be highly communicative and collaborative. They need to coordinate with various members of the team so everyone can see the big picture, identify where they can improve and be empowered.

Conclusion: It takes a team!

You need a wide range of different types of thinking hats to successfully execute a targeted marketing strategy- and maybe you are lucky enough to have all of these superstars and resources inhouse - heck you may even be able to do all of these activities yourself. But it is okay if you aren't there yet.

It is always better to seriously audit your own organisation's skills to identify gaps and then venture out to create partnerships and teams that have people with different skills and ways of thinking to create a real synergy that will turbo boost your efforts.

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Michael Rennison has been in the Direct Marketing Industry for over 30 years and has specialised in the use of data for targeting campaigns and adding value to clients marketing services. He has worked exclusively in the agency market supporting agencies with their data needs and being part of their team for pitches – Michael does not work with the end clients as he does not believe in the conflict of interest.