When you are marketing a business, you always need to think about your target customer. You need to understand what they want to see and what they will be interested in. Without this type of insight, it’s highly likely that your business doesn’t get the level of attention it needs to make a profit. Ideally, you want to make sure that you are hitting your target market every time, no matter what.
To do this, we need to think about who your target market is and how to reach them. Put simply, your target market should be the people who are always going to want to buy your products. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your product or service appeals to everyone because hardly any do. By thinking like this, you’ll stretch your marketing too thin, trying to attract everyone and ultimately reaching no one.
Think about who that target customer is and try and get a clear picture of them in your mind. Make sure that you understand what will make them buy, what their needs are, what preferences they have and what type of actions they might take. For instance, you might be selling items for new parents. One important factor to understand about new parents is that the mums or dads are going to be on leave from work. This will give them a lot of spare time, and when they’re not trying to catch up on sleep, they will be researching online. They might even be looking at different blogs to try and find people who have experienced the same type of issues as them.
So, it makes sense to use sponsored content on these blogs to target these consumers. That way, you should be able to reach down to them and provide them with the answers to their problems. You can do this subtly by designing content in the right way. But before we look at how to create content for targeting that key customer, let’s think about tone.
Choosing The Right Tone
The first step when you’re thinking about marketing to your target customers is choosing the right tone. Sometimes, it helps to be playful and a tad jovial with your customers, particularly on social media. And, if your target customer is the parents but the user of the products will be their kids. You see this quite a lot with companies like Disney. They try to hit both boxes and often run campaigns where consumers can interact with company and other fans online. For instance, they recently asked people about their favourite movies to celebrate the release of a re-release of one of their old cartoons.
Of course, in other cases, you have to adopt a more formal tone through marketing. The best example of this would be if things go wrong. If your servers go down or your systems crash, you can’t joke about it or be too light hearted. You have to show that you are acting professionally and doing everything you can to fix the issues.
B2B businesses are another type of company that must adopt a formal tone often at all times through marketing. While businesses will want to connect to your company, they also want to know that they are dealing with another professional, rather than an amateur.
What Affects Buying Behavior?
The short answer would be a lot. There are various things that can impact whether customers want to buy, an example is your website. Let’s think about your website for a moment. With a website, you have the chance of showcasing a number of ideas and altering the perception of your company. You might be running a healthcare company. If that’s the case, you need to think about the type of ideas that you want to be connected to your company. Healthcare marketing services will typically focus on making the site look clean, clear and modern. That’s why you will often find these sites have white or cream backgrounds, just like a hospital. The user interface will be smooth, simple and easy to operate, just like patients need medical services to be.
You might also find that there’s a video on the landing page with a friendly face. This shows the people behind the business or medical service, and you can probably understand why this is important in medicine. No one wants to feel like they’re just going to be another part of the system. Certainly not when it comes to looking after their health. This is just one example of how you can use buying behaviour to give customers exactly what they want.
Another possibility would be a website for kids. Now, a website for kids is considerably different to one for adults. It probably won’t have buying options, but rather it will be packed full of information. It might be colourful with lots of different graphics and animations. The main idea behind a website like this is to make sure you keep a firm grasp on their attention. That’s not easy, but with the right marketing in place, you can stop them from clicking away.
Content That Kills
Of course, a big part of the website is the content that customers find there. And if you want to hit that target dead on the bullseye you need to know how to create and produce content that appeals to them.
The best advice we can recommend here is that you create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Each piece of content should begin with a problem. It’s a problem that your customers have, and once you have introduced that problem, you can then introduce the solution. This is a solution that they can only get from your company. So, since we mentioned parents earlier on, let’s say that you are selling a light baby crib. Think of a problem this could solve for parents. In particular, it might allow them to take a crib with them on holiday and set it up in a hotel or wherever they are staying. That’s an idea that is sure to appeal to plenty of parents, and as such it could be a strong angle for marketing.
Of course, creating the content isn’t enough because you also need to think about when and how to release it. These days, the idea of great marketing is to get it shared online and hopefully ensure it goes viral. If it does, then you could reach hundreds, maybe thousands of new customers. So, when should content be released? Well, again this is based on your target customer and when they are most likely to be online. Around lunch time for content, publication is a smart move if your customers are business owners or employees. They’ll be surfing online around lunchtime, and they might see your new content. For parents or people who stay at home, you’ll have to look at buying habits for your individual business. You can do this by examining the time that most people view your website by exploring Google analytics. Once you have some information, you should be able to plan your marketing around it.
It is possible to use software to make sure that content is released from your site at the same time every day. That way, you can almost condition your target customers on when to expect it and ensure that they are always waiting.
We hope you use this advice to make sure that you hit your target market every time with your company.
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