There are many products on the market that seem like they are the perfect addition for any home or office. It can be frustrating for a company when they work hard to create promotional blog posts, videos, infographics, and eBooks that don’t attract the right leads. The truth is, if you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one.
According to a 2020 survey from HubSpot completed by 3,400 marketers, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. Considering HubSpot’s 2019 study revealed marketers who prioritize their blogging efforts were thirteen times more likely to see a positive return on their investment, it makes sense that companies are allocating more dollars towards content marketing.
But with billions of websites to compete against, companies need to have a strategic approach to content creation. It’s important to have a content strategy that enables the best features of your products and services to stand out against your competitors and catch the eye of your ideal buyer.
What’s the best way to accomplish this daunting task? The short answer is with an authentic, honest, and analytics backed strategy that speaks directly to a well-defined buyer persona in a personalized way. Targeted marketing increases the opportunities for your digital assets to pull up in the right search queries.
First, we’ll define the term “targeted marketing.” Second, we’ll explore the best ways to narrow down how to segment marketing personas. And finally, we’ll explore the four types of target market segmentation.
Targeted marketing identifies an audience likely to buy services or products and promotes those services or products to that audience. Once these key groups are recognized, companies can develop marketing campaigns and specific product support for those target groups or segments.
To maximize targeted marketing, you need to narrow down who your ideal buyer is with as much detail as possible. This begins with contextual research.
Narrowing down your target market begins by identifying your ideal buyer. A well-developed buyer persona includes details such as your potential customers’ pain points, their preferences, and some of the trends that may influence them.
The most recent research reveals that marketers create content to target multiple audience segments for a company’s products and services. Ultimately you will need to determine how many different audience segments to develop. Check out 19 Customer Segmentation Examples Your eCommerce Business Needs for a few ideas of different customer segments to consider.
The further you develop each persona, the more defined each segment becomes. With this information, you can ensure the content you develop is high quality as well as both helpful and educational.
When you know where your buyers prefer to consume their content, you will be able to create it for the medium they prefer. You can curate videos, blog articles, and infographics to help your potential and current customers solve pain points at different stages along their buyer’s journey.
Did you know more than 50% of consumers prefer video content over other forms of content such as emails, social media, and blogs? (source)
In addition to a well-developed buyer persona, you can accomplish context research for targeted marketing through keyword research. Keyword research includes more than branded words. Incorporating long-tail keywords, answers to commonly asked questions and your service location when applicable are all ideal opportunities for SEO.
Experts divide target marketing into four segments. Each division allows for content development to pull up in search queries for specific detailed personas.
The four types are:
This customer segmentation includes criteria like age, gender, single, married, income, education, religion, social class, race, and nationality. This is the most common segment because these variables are easy to identify and measure. Demographic segmentation can become more detailed when combining parameters such as income and social class or age and life-cycle.
Geographic segmentation divides consumers based on location. Segments can be broad such as dividing by nation or state. Segments can also be narrow such as county, city, or neighborhood.
Behavioral segmentation incorporates things such as occasions, benefits, usage rate, and brand loyalty as consumers' attitudes toward a product and how they use it are segmented.
Psychographic segmentation is the most challenging segment to gather data on because it involves two variables people can keep more private if they prefer: lifestyle profiles and personality profiles. Psychographic segmentation considers details of consumers such as: Does my buyer persona live in the moment, or does he keep one eye on the future? Is my buyer persona more introverted or extraverted? How politically active is my ideal buyer, and how does this influence their buying decisions? What are her interests and hobbies?
One helpful way to uncover psychographic segmentation information is through social listening. Read more about this subject on our blog post, The Importance of Social Listening.
According to Quoracreative, 2019, 23% of social media posts include a link to a blog post. Rather than simply posting a link, when you include a sentence or two explaining why you are posting the blog post along with an image, you will increase the chances to attract the attention of people scrolling through social.
Regardless, social media algorithms are one of the great mysteries on the internet. Social platforms have become masters of strategic wording. Take Instagram as an example:
Instagram posted this 5:23 PM - Jan 22, 2019
“What shows up first in your feed is determined by what posts and accounts you engage with the most, as well as other contributing factors such as the timeliness of posts, how often you use Instagram, how many people you follow, etc.
We have not made any recent changes to feed ranking, and we never hide posts from people you're following – if you keep scrolling, you will see them all. Again, your feed is personalized to you and evolves over time based on how you use Instagram.”
Focusing on the words highlighted in yellow here are the questions I have for Instagram about their word choice:
Rather than simply posting an image on Instagram and encouraging a reader to click the link in your profile to read the blog post connected to your image, you can use targeted marketing to connect with potential customers.
One way to increase the odds of connecting with your buyer persona on Instagram is to include the hashtags they’re most likely to follow within each post. If you’re targeting a local audience, you can narrow your audience even further by adding a location tag to the profile of the image.
This same strategy for targeted marketing works in a slightly different way on every social media platform and with your blog content as well as on YouTube. You can increase opportunities to connect by incorporating industry-relevant keywords your buyer persona is already using to search for companies like yours.
If your content strategy targets a local buyer, don’t forget to optimize for searchers who utilize the “near me” feature in Google. The best way to ensure you reach a local audience is to keep your Google My Business page optimized with accurate information.
For more information on optimizing for local search, check out our blog post Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Google My Business Listing.
In addition to social media, blog posts, and video marketing, it’s important to consider ways to leverage email marketing. HubSpot reports that in 2020, about 80% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement in the last 12 months.
Targeted marketing is an excellent way to increase your company’s opportunities to connect with the right people online and convert leads into buyers. By taking the time to develop detailed buyer personas, you can create content for different segmented audiences at different parts of their buyers’ journeys.
The more personalized your content is, the more your buyers will connect with you and your company. For more information on developing excellent content for your buyer persona download the Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Business Growth.
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