It’s Time to (Re)Define Your Target Audience

0513 Time to Re Define Your Target Audience

13May

Something that has come up again and again over the 11 years we have been executing campaigns for our clients at The Go! Agency, is a fairly obvious topic: clients and their target audiences.

This extremely crucial element, while seemingly simple, is often a missing piece of the puzzle, that many business owners struggle to identify, and may sometimes appear out of reach to nail down.

The typical answer we get to the question of target (or ideal) audiences is “anyone with money.” While I agree that this may be ideal, it is not exactly what we are trying to define here. A truly defined target market can literally make or break a solid marketing and sales strategy.

So how do you figure it out? How do you shake out the information that you already have about the kind of people who do business with you, and find your target audience from there?

This is exactly where I would begin.

Current Clients

If you are a company that has been in business for a period of time, the first place that I would go to look when (re)developing a target audience would be your current client base. What commonalities do your current clients have? Pull your current client list and take a close look at the data. Whether you have three clients or three thousand, you should be able to draw some similarities among your clients and customers. Look at everything from industry, company size, order size, geographical location, the title of contact on the contract/order, and more.

Depending on the number of reports that you have, you can find more qualified data than you think. Many people want to shoot for the stars with an ideal target audience based on dream scenarios, but looking at the trends you can draw from your own clients is best. These people chose you. They have given you money. These are the type of people that you should aim for.

Also, look to see how these people found you. This is crucial information when you begin to create your marketing campaign.

Prospects/Non-Closed

You should also have access to a list of past and other non-closed customers/clients. This is another often overlooked part of the whole system of (re)defining your target audience. Take a look at the data with these as well, and see if you can find more commonalities. Perhaps many of these clients didn’t close due to price. This might lead you to develop a new target audience (or sub-target audience) that you could create a more affordable package/product for. Don’t forget to also add where these people found you as it, again, will be useful when you begin to develop your marketing strategy. Try your best to identify what this group of people have in common. Remember too, knowing who your target customer isn’t is just as important.

Competitors

Are you a new business in the launching or pre-market stage? You MUST do your market research early, to not only prove the viability of your business but also find the audience in which you should begin to invest your marketing and sales dollars. Would your customer base spend more time on a specific social network? Do your potential customers prefer reading short social media posts, or long-form blog posts? Honestly, this is a lot of work, and you may have to do a full competitor analysis in order to complete this process (including signing up for the competitors’ newsletters and secret shopping to see how they serve their audience). Ignoring your competition, especially your successful competition, is a rookie mistake.

I tell you this because I have seen many companies latch onto a successful product or service concept, but never truly have a clear idea of their target audience. The result was off-market branding, poor targeting, low sales, and lots of marketing dollars wasted.

Website Visitors

Utilizing Google Analytics you can get an idea of where people are finding you online AND what they are looking for on your website.

Another great tool is our Web Wisdom AI – which is a plugin to your website that grabs all of the visitors to your website and sends you a report on each one of them in real-time. This valuable tool has enabled some of our clients to learn more than Google will allow in terms of the target audience. For example, one of our agency’s clients was targeting the entertainment field, but with this service, they realized that all of their website traffic was coming from financial organizations. When they found this out, they pivoted their approach and developed materials that were suitable to target this newly developed audience!

Now What?

Now you should jog over to LinkedIn Sales Navigator (another highly recommended service) to do a prospect search. Take the time to fill out all of the search fields within LinkedIn Sales Navigator – this should help you really define your target audience.

Looking more for B2C? Utilize the same process by looking at the demographics for Facebook Advertising. It is another great tool to help you remember the main factors that make up a target audience.

Redefining and re-examining your target audience is vital to making informed decisions and ensuring that your sales and marketing efforts are not wasted. If you’re struggling with crafting a message that your target audience is most likely to respond to or resonate with, don’t hesitate to reach out to my team of sales and marketing professionals at The Go! Agency. Every day, we help businesses across a broad range of industries fine-tune their audiences and marketing messages.

Why You NEED to Fix Your Facebook Target Audiences

By Christopher Tompkins

1May

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Picture this: You own a bakery in Tampa, FL. You decide to promote your budding brand online through social media marketing with an emphasis on Facebook advertising. But here’s the issue—once you log into your Business Manager to set up your audience, you see a plethora of options ranging from target demographics to specific zip codes to everything else that makes your head spin.

How do you know you are targeting the right people? It’s a valid concern. If you get it wrong, you could end up wasting your entire advertising budget trying to reach people who were never going to be interested in your bakery anyway.

When is it time to consider a change in advertising audience? Here are three scenarios that I see all the time:

You received a large number of engagements and conversions with your first ad, but saw a significant decrease in the next batch.
Customers are complaining they are seeing your ads too much.
You’re getting inquiries for areas your business does not serve.

If you’re seeing any of the above, you need to step up your audience targeting game. You can’t get those hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars back just because you chose to target the wrong audience, but you can move forward and adjust your scope.

Do yourself a favor and step away from your business for a moment. Look at your customer base with fresh eyes. You may be interacting with these people on a weekly or even daily basis, but you might not have really looked at who they are.

Sure Marge is a sweet lady who buys your gourmet cupcakes at every holiday, but what makes her tick? What does she want, what interests her, and most importantly, how would you sell your bakery’s goods to a woman just like Marge?

Your goal is to boil down your ideal customer by looking at the categories your current customers fit into.

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You should ask yourself the following questions:

1. What age range does my brand appeal to?
Does your business cater to a younger demographic or older adults? Maybe you sell products aimed at children, but remember that you’re really marketing to their parents. Or maybe you manage a senior living community, whose audience is not the potential residents, but rather their caregivers, who are in the 35-55 age range.

2. What location does my ideal customer live in?
Are you trying to appeal to someone in a specific city, like you would if you ran a bakery in Tampa? Or do you need to compile a list of zip codes to tackle a whole region, like say a business that wants to appeal to the Philadelphia/New York region? Regardless, location is an important factor. You may need to adjust your settings so that you don’t oversaturate your market as well, which would actually do damage to your brand as people get sick of seeing your ads.

3. What is the income of your ideal customer?
I once worked with a client who owned a luxury home renovation business. They would do amazing work on homes that were worth at least $650K+. Yet before they came to us, they tried to advertise on their own and failed to specify income in their target audiences. Needless to say, they had a lot of calls, but they were dead leads since nobody who saw the ad could afford their services. Once my team targeted people with higher incomes, we narrowed their reach and brought them real results.

There’s nothing to be done about it: You have to target the right audience. It may be challenging, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. You need to be sure the people who see your ads will actually be interested in your business!

Are you still a little fuzzy on how to optimize your Facebook ad target audiences? Let’s discuss it during your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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Go!TV Episode 12

By Christopher Tompkins

23Nov

GoTV, Social Media, The Go! Agency

Welcome to this week’s Go!TV episode recap! Who’s ready for the biggest breaking news from all across social media?

How to Make Gripping Content
Everyone wants to make content that pulls in readers, but not everyone knows how. Technical aspects like marketing strategy and adhering to buyer personas are important, but they can’t replace authenticity. Do you believe what you’re writing? Do you think it’s valuable for your audience? If you don’t, your readers will see right through it and the content won’t be able to help your business!

Express Writers

How to Create a Buyer Persona
At its core, there are six steps to making a realistic, useful buyer persona: Undergo user research, collect your findings, brainstorm ideas, refine them, make them applicable to a real human, and apply your persona to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With an effective buyer persona, you can relate to your audience in an authentic way. Use the resource below for a more detailed step-by-step guide!

Social Media Today

That’s the end of our recap! The takeaway: If you want to reach your customers, you need to speak to them like real people. Keep this in mind as you create content and buyer personas, and you should have a good leg to stand on! For more social media marketing advice, check out our blog and podcast!

Want to keep up with your favorite social media experts? Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

7 Social Media Marketing Things You Should Know but Don’t

By Christopher Tompkins

5Nov

Social Media

Social media marketing is constantly in flux, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. The best practices of yesterday are painfully outdated now. As a marketer, you’ve got two options: fall behind your competition, or stay sharp!

I’m going to share the seven biggest things across social media that every marketer should know—but most don’t. Let’s see how up-to-date your knowledge is!

1. You Need Tools
Social media management tools aren’t just flashy programs for people with money to burn. They’re an integral part of social media marketing, and if you’re not using them, odds are you’re falling behind.

Unless you like the idea of manually posting multiple updates across social media every day, writing error-ridden content, and having low-quality visuals, you’re going to need some help!

2. You Need to Curate Content
Thinking of fresh, original content every day isn’t going to work if you’re not seeing what other people in your industry are posting. Content curation lets you share relevant, valuable news with your followers and can give you ideas for how to produce your own unique content!

3. You Need to Understand Metrics
Nobody likes to learn a lot of jargon, but it’s there for a reason. In marketing, it’s not enough to just “go with your gut.” You need to have hard, quantifiable data to support your social media marketing strategy, and having a working understanding of metrics and when to track them is the only way to get that information.

4. You Need to Work on Visuals
Graphic design often gets pushed aside by marketers who chant the Bill Gates quote, “Content is king.” And sure, your written content is important, but nothing can replace the impact of quality visuals. Think about it: Would you read a blog with Pulitzer-worthy writing that looked like its visuals were made by a toddler? Of course not, because you never would have clicked on their content to begin with!

5. You Need to Find and Engage With Your Audience
The appeal of social media marketing is that you can target specific consumers who are most likely to buy from you, so why wouldn’t you make the most of that? By creating buyer personas and optimizing your engagement for your audience’s preferred social media platform, you can make your campaign much more effective.

6. You Need to Watch Your Competitors
It isn’t enough to just look at your own successes and shortcomings. Your competitors are, by definition, appealing to a similar market, so see what you can learn from them! By tracking their movements on social media, you’ll double your opportunities to improve your own strategy!

7. You Need a Checklist
If you’re running a multi-platform social media campaign, you simply can’t keep it all straight in your head. There are too many moving parts for anyone to remember every little thing! By keeping a checklist and running through it on a regular basis, you guarantee that nothing will slip through the cracks!

Don’t Stop Learning
These are essential parts of social media marketing, but it’s not enough to stop once you’ve mastered these! Take this information as a way to get you started. From there, keep reading! Social media will never stagnate, and neither can your understanding!

Everyone could use some help staying competitive on social media. If you’re not sure what to do, just schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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GoTV Episode 9

By Christopher Tompkins

2Nov

GoTV, Instagram

Thanks for coming back for this week’s Go!TV recap! This week we’re focusing on Instagram and giving you all the information you need to market on this visual platform!

Instagram

How to Create Instagram Advertisements
Instagram’s ads work within a targeted system. What does that mean? Well, your ads will be sent to a specific demographic that you specify. This saves a lot of wasted time and effort marketing to people who would never want your product! This guide shares how to optimize your Instagram ads across posts, stories, and all other forms of visual communication!

Business 2 Community

Video Marketing on Instagram
Whether you’re creating branding, product, or tutorial videos, you absolutely have to know what you’re doing to get anywhere on Instagram. Instagram has a lot of users and other marketers flooding it with content, which means your video has to stand out if it’s going to help you reach your marketing goals. Check out this guide and see how you can create different types of Instagram videos that your audience will love!

AdEspresso

Thanks so much for stopping by this week’s Go!TV recap! The Instagram market is as lucrative as it is saturated with ads and marketers, so it’s important that you know how to stand out. If you want to learn more about social media marketing, come visit our podcast and blog!

Want to see what other marketing advice we dish out? Check us out across social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter!

The One Mindset That Will Ruin Your Target Advertising

By Christopher Tompkins

28Feb

Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Marketing, Social Media

In our last blog, we spoke about the importance of focusing your audience when you are working on Facebook advertising. This is an extremely important step in reaching the right audience. But time and time again, we hear from professionals who say, “My product is for everybody.”

Having this mindset is when problems start to arise.

There is a distinct possibility that you sell a product or service that could technically be used by everybody. However, that does not mean that every person wants/needs your product.

Everyone drinks water, for instance, so you could easily assume that the target audience of a bottled water campaign would be everybody. However, this disregards the fact that “everybody” would include multiple types of people (demographics), each of which would be best communicated with in a different way. Creating a marketing campaign that speaks to everyone is nearly impossible as different groups receive messages in different ways.

Think of everyone who lives on your street. They all have different ages, different interests, different ways of talking and thinking. So trying to create one style of marketing that would connect with each of them would be impossible.

It’s not just a good lesson for marketing, but a good lesson for life. You can’t be all things to all people.

Even if your product can be used by everybody, it’s best to target your marketing at a specific demographic instead, to make your message more effective. It’s better to hit a million people with a campaign that resonates with them, rather than hitting a billion people with something that makes them all feel apathetic.

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be the job of your marketing department to choose this target audience anyway, it would happen while developing the product and branding it. Creating a bottled water that appeals to a certain demographic is better than a bottled water that’s supposed to appeal to everybody, and then has marketing targeted at a certain group.

A product or service can die quickly if there is no target demographic even as the product is being thought up. The more thought that is put into your product at the early stages, the better.

This is why it is essential for you to use social media’s plethora of tools to hone in on your ideal customer.

At The Go! Agency, our team of marketers are working hard to ensure our message reaches the right people! All this is so our clients gain optimal online visibility!

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Change Is Good: Why You Need To Tweak Target Audiences On Facebook

By Christopher Tompkins

26Feb

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Picture this — you own a bakery in Raleigh, NC. You decide to promote your budding brand online through social media marketing with an emphasis on Facebook advertising. But here’s the issue, once you log into your Business Manager, you see a plethora of options ranging from target demographics to specific zip codes to much, much more.

How do you know you are targeting the right people? For some, this leads to a mistake that can waste an entire advertising budget. If you’ve chosen wrongly, your advertisements may be reaching the people that would never bother to enter your bakery and become a loyal customer.

When is it time to consider a change in advertising audience? Here are three scenarios we have seen occur from time to time:

– You received a large number of engagements and conversions with your advertising at first, but showed a significant decrease in the next batch.

– Customers are complaining they are seeing your ads too much.

– You’re getting inquiries for areas your business does not serve.

All of these have happened to real businesses thanks to poor advertising targeting. Unfortunately, you can’t get those hundreds or even thousands of dollars back just because you chose to target the wrong audience members. However, you can move forward and adjust your scope.

Do yourself a favor and step away from your business for a moment and look at your customer base with fresh eyes. You may be interacting with these people on a weekly or even daily basis, but you might not have really looked at who they are. Don’t forget, these are real people with real wants, needs, and lives.

Your goal is to boil down your ideal customer by looking at the categories your customers fit into.

You should ask yourself the following questions:

– What age range does my brand appeal to? Does your business cater to a younger demographic? Or perhaps an older group of people? Maybe you sell products aimed at children, but you should really be marketing to their parents. Or maybe you manage a senior living community, whose audience is not the potential residents, but rather their families, who are in the 35-55 age range.

– What location does my ideal customer live in? Are you trying to appeal to someone in a specific city, like you would if you ran a bakery in Raleigh? Or do you need to compile a list of zip codes to tackle a whole region, like say the Philadelphia / New Jersey region. Regardless, location is an important factor. You may need to adjust your settings so that you don’t over-saturate your market as well, which would actually do damage to your brand.

– What is the income of your ideal customer? We once had a client that owned a luxury home renovation business. They would do amazing work on homes that were worth at least $650K+. Yet before they came to us, they tried to advertise on their own and failed to specify income. Needless to say, they had a lot of calls, but they were dead leads as none of the people that received the ad could afford their services. We were able to narrow their reach and bring them real results.

These are just a few reasons why you need to make sure your social media advertising is on-point. You need to be sure those that see your ads would actually utilize your business.

Here at The Go! Agency, we fine tune our advertising strategy on a daily basis to ensure our clients hit their target!

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