4 Reasons Why You Should Have a Target Audience
Audience targeting is a key component of an effective advertising campaign. It can be tempting to take a mass approach to your marketing strategy. After all, your product or service is absolutely fantastic and everyone should use it! will help so many people! It just makes sense that you’d want to get yourself in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Unfortunately, this approach can be costly and ineffective. Having a target audience in all areas of your marketing campaign (digital marketing, social media, traditional advertising, and email marketing) ensures that you’re getting your message to the people who are going to benefit the most from your product or service.
Return on Investment
The return on investment, or ROI, is one of the main reasons to develop a target audience and focus your marketing tactics on that group. Targeting your messaging to a narrow and defined audience means you’re reaching people who are most likely to benefit from your product or service. When you do this, you’re not wasting time and resources delivering your message to people who are unlikely to use your product. If you’re selling bathing suits, it wouldn’t make sense to take out a full-page ad in the newspaper in January. Sure, there may be a few people that may need a bathing suit. But likely you’re not going to make enough sales to justify the cost of the advertising. If you create a Google ad for bathing suits where you are targeting people who recently booked Caribbean cruises, more people will see it who are in the market for a bathing suit. You get a greater return on your advertising dollars when you target your advertising to people who need your product.
Build Brand Loyalty
Understanding your target audience allows you to better connect with the people who are benefiting the most from working with your business. When you build high-quality connections between your brand and your audience, it makes people feel valued and want to contribute to the success of your company. Feeling heard, understood, and accepted fosters feelings of loyalty. This means you have a fan base that will become a part of your marketing team. Their engagement on your social media and word-of- mouth referrals will help spread your message. Members of your target audience that are loyal to your brand will share your business with other people that share similar traits and values.
Efficient Sales Process
It takes time, effort, and energy to bring people from a lead to a customer. When you effectively market to a segmented audience, you are putting higher-quality leads into the top of the funnel. You’re targeting people who are most likely to use your product or service work with you, so they’ll require less nurturing to convert to a customer. If you are a commercial landscaping contractor, targeting only businesses in your advertising campaign saves you the time and bandwidth of fielding calls from homeowners seeking residential services. Having a target audience helps ensure that the time you’re spending nurturing leads will result in sales.
Establish Authority
Targeting your audience allows you to become an expert on appealing to the people who are going to get the most from your product or service. You will identify what words, images, and strategies work to get their attention and understand how you can best communicate the value of your product or service to them. This builds trust within your audiences and differentiates you as an industry leader. Targeting your audience allows you to deliver an impactful message that increases your credibility.
OK, now what?
Now that you understand why audience targeting works, it’s time to figure out who your target audience is and how to reach them. We can help! Our strategy team works with businesses every day to craft messaging that appeals to their target audience.
