5 steps to find and engage your target audience

Taken from imedia Connection, here are five steps to successfully reach and engage the target audiences that matter most to you, wherever they might be.

Identify and segment your existing audience

Talking to your current customers and your sales team that engages them every day will go a long way to helping you understand your ideal prospects. And getting a handle on the people who are actually visiting the online channels you own will get you the rest of the way. In order to more clearly define the prospects that matter most, take advantage of analytics-based tools to help you identify trends within both your existing audience and target audiences. Online analytics tools can help you determine the demographics, such as industry, job function, and company size, of the people visiting your website and landing pages, helping you define your audience segments more clearly.

Next, analyze your social media followers and in-house marketing database to enhance buyer profile attribution and determine exactly which segments are engaging with you. Once you have identified your actual current audience, focus on identifying target markets that you aren’t reaching successfully, or markets that you’re reaching — but are not converting. You might find that your tactics and message have been hitting the wrong target.

Refocus branding efforts to appeal to prospects

Branding campaigns are necessary to build awareness among prospects you haven’t yet touched. They also help to increase interest and engagement among your existing prospects as well as shape perception of your company, brand, and product offering. The end goal of any branding effort is to get more of the right prospects into the top of your funnel, and to increase the velocity of leads through your funnel to ultimately convert a prospect into a customer.

Use your customer segmentation data to develop specific “buyer personas” for the stakeholders involved in either influencing or making the “buy” decision. This might be information such as role in the organization, challenges and business needs, preferred type of marketing content, and purchasing behavior. You can glean the data from website analytics tools, contact and lead attribution data in your existing CRM, and marketing automation platforms, as well as from external research that illustrates the buying behavior of each customer segment.

Armed with a clear picture of who you are looking to reach, focus on developing messaging, creative, and content that clearly communicates your brand’s value proposition based on each audience segment’s needs and role in the purchase process.

Full article here.