Developing a solid marketing strategy for your business is how you establish your brand, engage with your customers and increase your profitability. Utilizing social media and improving your digital strategy is a surefire way to speak directly to your audience with messages that are specifically curated to meet their needs and interests.
But first, you have to know who exactly your audience is. The idea that you need to know who your target audience is and tailor your messaging is FACT.
At the end of this article, you’ll be a pro at:
- Understanding how knowing your audience can impact your business
- Determining who your audience is
- Tailoring your messaging to your target audience
- Communicating your brand through a customized digital marketing strategy with the right tools
What Are Target Audiences?
If your messaging appealed to everyone in every location, of all ages and professions, you would have an endless collection of prospects to target with your digital marketing but with little leads or sales.
But, in the real world, there is always going to be a unique set of people that hears your message and responds to it in a tangible way. And within that set, you could have multiple segments.
First, you have your primary audience. A primary audience is the core group of people you try to reach whenever you deploy a new marketing message, launch a new product, etc. These are the people who have the buying power and influence to make purchase decisions. An example for you as a distributor may be fire protection engineers, head architects, lead builders or directors of safety and operations.
Your secondary audience is someone who isn’t the person you’re directly addressing with your messaging but is still able to make a significant impact. They aren’t the ‘most likely’ to buy your product or service but are still the second-most important audience. Why?
It’s crucial for you to market to secondary audiences because they are likely a current or potential user of your product or service. Or, they could have immense influence over whether or not the primary audience will purchase your product or service. For example, your secondary audience could be general contractors, supervisors, foremen, or safety officers.
The more you know about your primary audience and your secondary audience, the easier it is to create digital campaigns that work. But how do you determine who is in your best target audience?
How Distributors Can Determine Their Best Target Audiences
Segmentation is the process of breaking a large audience down into smaller, more manageable chunks, and it is a great way to uncover optimization opportunities that you might not see when looking at everyone all together.
Most segmentation falls into three categories: behavioral, demographic or psychographic. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Behavioral segmentation divides people based on previous behaviors they’ve exhibited or previous actions they’ve taken. Think of Netflix’s or Spotify’s “Recommended For You” playlists. As a distributor, you would want to target people who have previously searched for similar keywords to your products or services.
Demographic segmentation divides people based on physical and socioeconomic factors, like age, gender, education level, income level, job title or location. Smoke Guard has a distributor network tool on our website and you would want to target customers within your demographic location. If you’re a business located in the Southeast, it would be a waste to market to people thousands of miles away in the Pacific Northwest.
An architect on a rural school project in Kansas will have very different requirements for flooring, windows, smoke protection products and soundproofing than an architect on a high-rise project for an office block in New York City.
Psychographic segmentation divides people based on their beliefs, emotions, personality traits, lifestyle, world views, interests and intent. It’s the hardest one to be able to see.
For example, your primary customer may be a design engineer or head architect and they are in charge of all the products that are going to be used in a new project. They take certain things into consideration based on their lifestyle, job description and their beliefs of what makes a perfect job site.
They think of overall design integrity, long term job performance and lasting quality. These are all very important needs. But these needs are going to differ from your secondary customer, who may be head of purchasing and is a major number-cruncher.
The head of purchasing is going to be looking closely at pricing, lead times, minimum order quantities, freight costs and availability. Are you going to be able to make a sale if both of these customers are not satisfied with what you can offer? You need to tailor messages and products to appeal to both customers.
So which of these segmentation tactics is the best? Well, it depends. And also, who says you only have to pick one?
No segmentation category is perfect, and for the best results, you should combine all three. This will give you the most robust, data-driven target audience segments to help you put out the most proficient marketing campaigns.
You can find a lot of your behavioral and demographic details by looking at analytics on your social media pages, any current campaigns you have running or from your customers’ past purchases.
For instance, if you have a Facebook page, you can go to Facebook Insights > People and see their interests, locations and integrations with other social platforms. This lets you know the lifestyle of your audience, so you can target other people like them. If you have a LinkedIn page, you can view demographic info about your followers including position levels at a company – helpful knowledge to understanding if you are reaching your target audience, especially key decision-makers.
For instance, we know that, at Smoke Guard, we have a pretty even mix of entry-level and senior/upper-level positions in our LinkedIn audience, and our audience’s top job function is sales, followed closely by operations and engineering. By knowing our unique blend, we are able to provide a ratio of content that not only speaks to specific job functions and knowledge levels, but inspires questions and creates a dialogue that the entire industry benefits from.
Create a Digital Marketing Strategy & Communicate Your Brand Properly
So now that you know who to target, how will you reach them?
Before you even think about what content you should post, you first need to understand what issues and problems your target audience is facing. The content you create can’t just push your product; it needs to focus on helping your audience solve some of their most complex problems, even if it doesn’t immediately lead to a sale for you.
Examples of content topics for challenges your audience may be facing:
- Looking for inspiration for a new project
- Safety or building code issues
- Targeting efficiency in your operations
Your content should feature the solutions they are looking for, not constant sales pitches on the features of your product.
Most Common Audiences for Distributors
For distributors, you are going to have three key and common audiences to try and target. These audiences are going to be:
- Architects and designers
- Contractors
- Engineers
There’s a lot of resistance to change in the face of massive technological disruption across the entire building industry. When working with these audiences above, the manufacturers and distributors that are poised to come out on top are the ones that help people with their new products and continually educate their customers on topics they care about.
A big differentiator in the building industry is trust and credibility. When you position yourself as a distributor that has a strong presence on different media platforms and put the customer first by sharing your expertise for free through a blog or social media, people are more likely to switch to your brand.
Examples of Proper Communication With Target Audiences
Communication with your target audience is easier today than ever before. Great places to start are social media channels and your own website.
Smoke Guard utilizes LinkedIn to communicate with our target audience directly. We share product launches, product demo videos, personal anecdotes from satisfied customers and educational expertise almost daily. We make sure to always link directly to our website, another great place for targeted messaging, for people who want to learn more.
We also use our corporate blog to share targeted solutions and educational resources to our audience. Our blogs range from inspiration for design to general safety education to technical details on how our products are created.
Tools to Help You Determine Your Best Audiences
If you run any paid ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, you can regularly check your analytics and see what kind of demographics visit your ads and how many conversions you get. In digital marketing, a conversion is any event that is tracked and recorded when a campaign goal or interaction is complete. It can be as big as a sale or as “small’ as a link click to a blog.
Simply focusing on what type of audiences that visit your website the most using Google Analytics will put you multiple steps ahead of your competitors because you’ll learn how to target the right people at the right time.
With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to uncover:
- Where to find potential customers
- Potential/actual target audience locations
- Interests of your target audience and their demographics
- What websites your target audience came from
- What platforms would be best for you to advertise on
- What content is or isn’t working for you
Discover Your Ideal Target Audience Today
Knowing the right audience is crucial for distributors when creating and implementing a digital marketing strategy that works.
When it comes to marketing your distribution services, it is a lot easier to market to a specific group of people than it is to market to the vast majority of the internet. By defining your target audience, and the buyer personas within that target audience, you’ll be able to generate qualified leads more efficiently and at a lower cost.
If you don’t have a target audience when you run your marketing campaigns, your copy will be too general and too product-focused with not enough customer-focus. In essence, it will feel like a sales pitch instead of a solution offering.
Plus, your geographic locations would be more general, which means you would spend more money on advertising in areas that probably aren’t even relevant to your services. Your Key Performance Indicators would be more general and harder to cater to specific goals. The quality of your leads is going to be much lower and your conversion rate is going to be dismal.
Overall, without a targeted audience strategy, your ROI is going to suffer.
One way to get started with your audience targeting is to choose one social media platform to focus on. Check out our article on How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Sales and use it to help guide the creation of your LinkedIn strategy.
We know there are many pieces to creating a full digital marketing strategy that works for you and Smoke Guard is here to help. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or would like recommendations to reach more of your target audience and strengthen relationships with your current customers.
We’re in this together.