Don’t Miss the Target!

Tools for Finding and Reaching Your Audience

All marketers are tasked with generating “more” — more exposure, more awareness, more conversions. Dialing in on which customers to target can be daunting, leaving you with questions like, “Is there an untapped audience we should be speaking to?” and “How can we reach the most specific target in the most efficient way?”

Allow us to put you at ease: The answer isn’t always to go bigger. In fact, it could be the opposite.

Targeting tactics have dramatically improved, along with the viability of targeting an ultra-specific audience. As the capacity for drilling down and reaching a more granular audience increases, so do your chances of success.

To accomplish your microtargeting goals, you’ll need a highly customized approach. Keep reading for some of the first steps of building out your ultra-niche marketing strategy:

Step 1. Build Personas

For a marketing campaign to be successful, it is critical to nail down your target consumer’s needs. While your product or service may be exactly what they need, it won’t reach them without effective positioning. This is where building personas comes into play; personas are essentially potential customer profiles that detail their needs and purchase processes. This information will clarify the position of your product or service, making it easier to refine a targeted marketing strategy.

Step 2. Identify Your Targeting Tactics

After building personas, you’ll want to identify ways to reach your specified consumer. Before selecting media, focusing on the ways to target these customers is key. Do they hold certain titles within specific companies or verticals? Have they recently experienced a significant life event? Is there any personal information you can use to identify them with, like an email address or phone number? After uncovering who you’re speaking to, research and targeting tactics are the next steps to success.

Step 3. Make Your Media Selection

The media selection process is all about combining your personas and targeting strategies to select the media and vendors that will most effectively engage your consumer. It’s important to consider how much information prospective customers will need to fully grasp what you are offering and to select the media best suited for communicating this information. For example, native ads and videos are great conduits for messaging that requires more context and, therefore, would be suitable media types for educational content.

Step 4. Craft Your Campaign Strategy

Now that you’ve dialed in on your target audience, identified their needs, and decided on the best ways to speak to them, it’s time to put all of the pieces together. It’s important to note that it’s rare for a single medium to work effectively on its own; a multifaceted marketing strategy is best for engaging a larger audience over time. For example, native ads and social posts are a great first step in making your target customers aware of the ways you can meet their needs, but it is most effective to support these initial efforts with paid media, like search and display ads. You’ll also want to consider the timeline for your strategy: Familiarity increases engagement in the long term, so be sure to account for the time it could take to familiarize your audience with your products or services.

Step 5. Creative Development

As you’re crafting creative for your campaign, be sure everyone has the same vision for how the audience will see the ads, what the ads are intended to communicate, and where they will fit in the overall timeline. Prioritize what needs to be communicated and what is needed in order to communicate it. For example, videos and native ads can focus more on raising awareness of the need, while banner ads and emails can focus on credibility and value propositions. A comprehensive creative effort is essential to providing your target audience with the information it needs to decide on purchasing your product or service. A/B testing of high-level communications is also a key tactic for providing insight on which messaging your audience is most receptive to.

Step 6. Evaluate & Optimize

Now that your plan and materials have been perfected and A/B testing has been incorporated to better understand the audience, it’s time to evaluate. Ask yourself the important questions:

• Are engines pacing at the expected rate? If so, great! You’ll want to be thinking of ways to remain at a desired pace. If not, it may be time to revisit the earlier steps.
• Are clickthrough rates lower than expected? Since your audience is very defined, clickthrough rates should at least be around industry standards, if not higher. Low clickthrough rates may indicate that messaging isn’t engaging or communicating effectively.
• What does the site engagement look like when people do click through? Are people spending enough time on a page to read the content? What is the average video view duration? Once you confirm that the right people are being reached and that the messaging is received well, you can analyze how the media is lifting other channels such as direct and organic as well as whether additional tactics should be launched.

Step 7. Work with a Trusted Partner

If these steps to reaching your target audience have you excited but a little overwhelmed, fear not! Working with an agency that is able to understand your consumer and your product/service is a foolproof way to execute a successful microtargeting or niche marketing strategy. At BNO, we’re well versed in speaking to targeted audiences across multiple verticals, from fintech to healthcare.