In last week’s article – the second in our “2021: A Year to Ramp up Your Digital Marketing Strategy” series – we looked more carefully at the importance of setting clear goals, asking and answering the following questions:
- Who am I trying to reach?
- Where are they?
- How do I reach them?
- What am I asking them to do?
- How am I facilitating that transaction?
- What impact will that transaction have on my bottom line?
- What impact do I want that transaction to have on my bottom line?
- How do I know what’s working, and what’s not working?
This week we’re looking at the next in the list of priorities to consider. More specifically, we’re delving more deeply into your understanding your customer…
#2 Know who your customer is, where they are and how to communicate with them
Knowing who the specific person is that you’re trying to reach with your digital marketing is a major factor in setting up a successful campaign. But you need to know who they are, where they are, how to reach them and what to say using digital media channels.
You’ll already have a pretty good idea about who your customer is – whether that’s an existing profile, or perhaps a new audience segment that you want to expose your brand to and develop sales through.
But how can you refine this audience into specifics? Here are some pointers…
1. Use Google Analytics and social media tools such as Facebook Insights, as well as UTM tracking codes on your previous campaigns to give you more detailed data on your existing customers. These tools can give you insights such as age, location, language, spending power and habits, devices used to engage online, interests, challenges and other data points of value.
2. Analyse where they’re spending most of their time online – is it on Facebook? Or Snapchat? These may vary greatly by age, gender and location – for example, younger females in urban settings tend to spend more time on Snapchat and less time on Facebook, so if that’s your target audience then Snapchat is a better option for paid campaigns.
3. Analyse when would be best to engage with them. There is a lot of data that will tell you the days and times that digital marketing campaigns are most effective – for example, Wednesdays between 9am and 1pm is a highly-engaging time.
How will you know what to say? What words will mean something to your target audience, what imagery?
To answer this question takes a bit of old-fashioned introspection – what are you trying to get your audience to do? I.e. what is the purpose of the campaign and how will it entice a customer by making their lives better, teaching them something, making something more convenient or allowing them to have the thing they want?
If you can answer these questions – the ‘features and benefits’ – then you’ll know how to structure your creative elements, calls to action, ad copy, imagery and more to ensure it’s as enticing as it needs to be. Here are some more pointers:
4. Use ‘social listening’ to understand more about what your brand means to your audience – what relevant keywords and hashtags is your audience using about your company, your products, your sector? What are they saying about your competitors? Monitor these across multiple platforms to build up an understanding of what different audience segments may think and say. There are a number of tools you can use to make social listening easier – these include Hootsuite, Adview, ReviewTrackers, Talkwalker, Audiense and Synthesio. These tools will also help you with points 1 and 2, and are thus greatly valuable!
5. Know and understand your competitors – you’ll not only learn how to beat them at their own game, but also gain valuable insights into what has worked for them so that you can employ these learnings in your own campaigns. Tools like Buzzsumo and Search Streams are really useful to help you understand your competitors better.
Next week, we’ll look more closely at where you’re sending your newly-acquired potential customer… is your website or landing page set up to encourage the next step in the purchase or consideration journey? Is your call centre equipped to deal incoming calls? Is your email tracker set up to send out automated responses, or alert you to respond?
Look out for our next article!
In the meantime, if you have questions around your digital marketing strategy or would like to get some guidance and advice, contact one of the team at Realnet today on 01223 550800 or info@realnet.co.uk.
We look forward to helping you achieve your business goals using your digital technologies.