Is your business doing a good job of reaching out to specific customers, or just putting out a generic message on the web, hoping that people show up?
The idea of tailoring a message to a customer is extremely important today, as businesses do a lot more with valuable business intelligence that they get through cloud services with other vendor options. Businesses of all sizes will want to be profiling and targeting their customers, because it can save a lot of time and effort, and generally improve conversion and profit.
Here are some ways to take advantage of your valuable data to get better results on the web.
Target by Customer Status
One of the most fundamental kinds of audience targeting is targeting a customer according to their relationship with the business. Bigger companies have big, fancy customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that help them to do this — but that’s not specifically necessary. Even a very simple database can easily keep track of whether a particular customer has bought from the business before — and that makes a big difference. You’re going to want to send a different message to a returning customer than you would to a new one, making this one of the most common ways to define customer audience.
Target by Role
Both B2B and B2C companies also tend to target by role. If it’s a retailer, they may target customers by their age and demographics, or whether they are the head of the household or not. Just this simple key factor can make a lot of difference in efficient messaging in how you reach your customers.
For a B2B company, businesses will often target customers by their job roles. There is a lot of talk about gatekeepers, and how to get to the right decision makers involved with business messaging. Again, a CRM platform can help with this, but you can also ‘go DIY’ and keep track of people’s job roles by hand, or with other electronic tools. In fact, LinkedIn provides options for such role targeting for B2B marketing.
Target by Positive Interest
Another type of audience targeting is as old as business itself — companies want to identify customers according to their hobbies and what they like, to try to sell them the right products. What’s brand-new, though, is the flood of data that businesses now have about customers, due to the big data revolution and the digital age. Your in-house business data can be a treasure trove of information that can help you to sell better and sell more — but somebody has to do the research and make that happen.
At WebSubstance, we understand the importance of audience targeting. We know that the research that goes on behind the scenes helps to make web sites and marketing campaigns even better. Let us work with your company to perfect the art of audience targeting, bringing in higher ROI for your marketing.
