The development of an ideal online marketing
campaign relies on your complete understanding of the target audience.
By now, you must have come across terms like
search engine optimization (SEO), user experience, keywords, and conversion.
However, you might be wondering what they actually mean, or what they have in
common.
Well, the terms relate to how you can attract,
engage, and win over your target audience for an online marketing campaign.
The most important thing in any marketing
campaign is to identify and understand your target audience psychographic,
demographic, and geographic attributes.
Apart from understanding the location and mindset
of your audience, you should make sure that have all the information about
their
• Interests
• Opinions
• Values, and
• Personality traits
A comprehension of the above information will
enable you to optimize your content, create an impressive user experience, and
design your pages to generate desired responses. Also, you will be able to
ascertain the appropriate keywords and topics for you target audience, and
customize the message to respond to their searches and needs.
The following are some basic steps you can use to
create an ideal marketing campaign for your online audience:
1. Carry out a thorough and exhaustive market
research
The best way to know about your target audience
is to conduct a thorough market research. Of course the market research should
help gather all the information about your audience.
Although this seem redundant, you can never know
about the people you want to communicate with unless you undertake an
initiative to establish who they are and what they need.
Here are some methods that you can use to collect
the information about your target market and the relevant audience for the marketing
campaign:
• Consult from other departments in your
organization. For instance, the sales department has a lot of information
concerning your customers and the target market in general.
The marketing team can assist with relevant
keywords and industry trends.
• Use online tools like social media sites and
consumer databases and industry report to gather all essential information
relevant to the campaign.
• Conduct a survey, specifically an online
survey. This can be done through email or using a wide range of applications
available online.
• Carry out interviews. Whether online or
offline, you can focus on a subset of your target audience, using a few
potential customers.
2. Develop personas of your target audience.
Once you have collected information concerning
your target audience, the next logical step is to use the information to create
personas of your prospective clients.
A person is simply a profile representing the
attributes, or a comprehensive picture of your campaign target audience. Do not
simply build buyer profiles of your audience. On the contrary, make sure that
you combine the collected information to create images that link your target
audience to specific aspects of your marketing campaign.
For example, your personas can be grouped into
millennial and the elderly. In these age groups you can develop further
personas with particular needs and tailor your content and search engine optimization efforts to connect with them.
The personas can incorporate essential attributes
of your audience including their interest, priorities, concerns, pain points
and goals among others.
3. Identify what influences your target audience.
Overall make sure that you know who or what
influences your target audience and make sure that your content links up with
them. The influences might include celebrities, politicians, or activists among
others.
Reach out to the influencers and where possible
use them to promote your campaign. Of course you might have to compensate them
but ensure it worth the while.
All the best in your marketing campaign...
