4 Questions to Answer About Your Target Audience Before Creating a Digital Marketing Campaign
In business, we typically have no shortage of ideas to share with our customers about our services. By contrast, we often fall short when it comes to directly acknowledging our customers’ pain points, recognizing their specific challenges and knowing how they might be searching to fulfill a particular need.
So before you create a digital marketing campaign, consider these four important questions to keep you in synch with your customers’ needs.
1. What are your customers looking for?
Do your research. Are your customers staring down a particular problem — an issue resulting from regulatory changes, new competitive forces in their market or perhaps challenges with sales force enablement? Are your customers seeing unique marketing communications trends in their marketplace? Or perhaps they are looking to solve a specific problem — like ants in their basement.
2. When do they need to know the information?
People have ever increasing expectations to have the information they need at the exact moment when they need it. The more you understand about when your customers are looking for answers, the more likely your messages are to be received. Work to have brand messaging intersect with the particular problem through search marketing, video advertising, content placement or other promotional outlets.
3. How do they like to get content?
Are your target customers more likely to engage in traditional communications like direct mail or billboards? Or are they more likely to search for your product or service on the Web? Either way, what digital marketing tactics will be relevant to your customer’s needs? Do they want to see product demos, how-to videos or simply grab a PDF brochure and run? And to add a layer of complexity, are your targets more likely to use a mobile device to get their content and if so is the user experience of your digital properties optimized for viewing through various devices?
4. What will most likely get them to engage?
Once you know what your customers are looking for and when and how they like to consume content, what will it take to get them to engage in using your product or service? White papers, research reports, coupons and requests for information are great ways to get direct contact information for your targets. But there are also more subtle ways to determine if they are doing anything of value in your digital marketing campaigns.
For example, if you provide weight loss and fitness programs, you might know from your existing customer base that people who complete a fitness self-assessment are more likely to sign up for a trial program. Therefore, you might consider offering an online fitness self-assessment combined with a sign-up promotion to engage your target customers. Analytics can show how many target customers started and finished the assessment as well as where they fall out of the funnel. These insights can help you streamline your marketing activities over time.
SOUND OFF: How do you answer the four questions?
