Target The Right People

It’s easier than ever to reach your target audience, social media have given us a platform to be in direct contact with our customers at any point of the day and email allows us to keep constant communication with ease – traditional marketing media such as flyers and banners still play a huge role too as people seek a change from an exclusively digital interaction. But with so many forms of contact, both directly and indirectly, how do you ensure you’re reaching the right audience? How can you target the right people? We find out…

How To Target The Right People – Tips For Ensuring You’re Reaching Who You Need To

Knowing your audience

The most important factor to targeting the right audience is to first know who that audience is – if you’re a retirement service, advertising to a group of 20-somethings isn’t likely to see any return. It’s no doubt that you’ve done your market research, however conveying that into your marketing material may be a bit more difficult and more often than not, it’s a little bit of trial and error. There are plenty of tools such as surveys that may help you identify how to reach specific audiences, however it’s rare that a medium could be used for each group – understanding what platforms your target audience prefers, and how they interact with that platform is key.

Understanding your competition

It’s likely you already know who they are and what they do, but you may not have taken a closer look after this – but looking at the services they offer and how they interact with their audience could show you things that they’re doing, or even shortcomings in your own efforts.

Identifying the correct medium

The easiest option may not always be the correct one, and choosing one that may not be the most ideal could have the problem of not getting your message out there. This may also be extended to using mediums that you may not be familiar with or haven’t used before. Some to consider may be;

Banner Printing – A more traditional form of advertising, but done properly it can be very successful. The benefit of this form of media is that it doesn’t require a great deal of work to target correctly – once you have your design and the message you want to push, it reaches all audiences the same. It is possible to tailor what you want to a specific audience, but it may not be needed. An additional benefit that is unique to this form of advertising is the portability – once you send something online either via email or through a website, you’re relying on your audience to view that material, however pop up banners and flags are reusable and portable, allowing you to move the advertising to hit different audiences even within the same day as required.

Exhibition Stands – Very similar to banners and flags, this can serve as a universal targeting tool as it doesn’t rely on complexity – if you’re able to keep the message and design very simple, it targets all audiences without needing to be tailored to appeal to a specific group. Additionally it is also reusable and portal, giving it much more flexibility.

Email – A difficult tool to reach an audience with if you’re unfamiliar with the process – typically you wouldn’t want to include too much information – there’s a fine line between having just the right amount of information and bombarding your consumer with some fluff. You also have to be careful to not send too many, or to populate it with certain information to prevent it from being marked as spam by most email providers – and even then, gaining a high engagement rate without audiences outside of your target may be very difficult.

Social Media – It’s a powerful tool but also very segmented, you may find that the marketing work you’re doing is only reaching a very small group of what you’d like it to. For example, marketing on Facebook would reach a very different audience to what advertising on Instagram would do.

Running a Survey – By far the easiest way to find out if you’re targeting the correct audience is to do a survey – there are many ways to do this, you can run email surveys, social media surveys or you can even use more traditional forms of media such as popup banners to advertise you’re running a survey with paper handouts, although this typically means collecting the data takes a little more time. Running a survey however lets you reach out directly to the audience that you’re looking to get your content to, and tell you what you’re doing right, and also what you’re doing wrong.

It is important to remember to use ways of marketing that operate in a universal way – using digital marketing for example may only reach those that are only at the targeted times or that visit the target location. For posted advertisements such as flyers and lets, you will only reach the homeowner or the one person that opens the letter. Utilising modern methods alongside more traditional forms of visual advertising together will give you the biggest benefit as you’re able to reach a much wider group of people.