Digital Marketing Audience Strategies
Targeting audiences traditionally meant social presence and ads. But audiences also self identify with words within search phrases, widely misclassified. Audience thinking gives you higher conversion rates, extended memorability and joined up channels.
Your marketing spend lasts longer when it is about them. Audiences are a marketing superpower; it is where profitability comes from.
And yet, our content is neither organised around what people want, nor who they are.
What audiences?
The first thing to do is to separate audiences by what they want first.
A website’s current visitors are our lowest-hanging audience, insofar as they are a group of people who have us in their eyeline. It is a great source of actionable data. A feedback loop.
But visitors are an outcome, not an audience strategy.
Audience or Niche?
This page introduces the idea of using audience definitions to target our prospects.
Niche is such a misunderstood and misapplied description of targeting. In much the same way, horizontal and vertical can straitjacket strategy thinking. We can be precise with what things mean (semantic intelligence).
- If we use the word niche, it will mean many things to different people.
- If we use the words horizontal and vertical, it will limit our ambitions.
Audiences are a more granular and specific way to talk about who we are targeting.
Audience Driven or Market Driven?
The two forms of targeting will increasingly be called into question. Just by making the distinction, we can start to understand the impact of our decisions. Just as there are more markets than you think, there are more layers of audience, invisibly making an impact.
Audience targeting will become increasingly necessary, as we may need to follow suit when the competition does.
Or, we could get there first.
Choosing which audiences is based on what?
True audience strategies consider
- Their criteria are the aspects of themselves that impact their buying decisions
- Choosing channels – aspects of their identity also determine how we connect with them
- Search, Social and Partnering
- Intrinsic and invisible audiences
Define audiences
It’s a bit of a ‘stuffy’ old-fashioned word, a concept, a fluffy thing, but there is no better word available to consider our targeting methodology.
A group of people with a common interest, and/or common aspects of who they are.
What is a market audience?
The more affinity we have with those groups, the more likely we can be relevant with our offer, find them receptive to our messaging, and more likely to buy into us and our products and solutions.
A lot of marketing advice assumes you have already chosen your audience. I’ve always thought that post-audience marketing advice is a little tone-deaf.
It’s not straightforward.
As much as we want to choose our audiences, we can’t reach them without using different channels. There’s no point in planning to work for an audience you can’t profitably reach. And if you reach them, is it the right time?
Search marketing is the right timing.
Do channels come before audiences?
We can only get to audiences through channels. Do we need to look at the different channels first?
Channels define the available audience.
How do we find the most effective audiences and channels, and in what order do we do it? If we could determine that in advance, we could preserve our hard-won marketing budget.
Do we pick audiences and then find channels?
What type of audiences are there, and what are the most actionable?
How do we choose the most effective channels?
Channels define the available audience.
Therefore channels come before audiences. If you define audiences and then try and pick channels, then the risk is you won’t find them.
Audience Strategy
Knowing who to talk to and how to reach them
Search Audiences is a highly practical marketing framework. It is one of the few methods that allow you to ‘see’ audiences and what they want.
Audiences exist; you can’t just make them up.
But how does search fit into the marketing mix overall?
What audiences are we serving?
Decide which channels are right for your business
There are more factors at play than being a B2B or B2C.
The B2B B2C thing doesn’t make much sense in digital. Who you market and sell to no longer defines how you do it.
- Where do they hang out, and which channels do you use
- How do you find them and connect
- Are they looking for you, or are you looking for them
- Niche industries or roles
- Frequency of buying decisions and buying cycles
Define the activity at each stage
The same channels are useful for different phases of marketing, which can be confusing.
Marketing Phases
- Making new connections (search, social, partnering)
- Nurturing, developing existing
- Nurturing, developing existing
- (sales)
- Client onboarding and success
Segmenting?
Overlapping audiences gives you specificity to create traction for your content.
The humble website and your email system are the best tools ever invented to segment and have different conversations with your best prospects.
Who do you serve?
What is this site for?
- Curating digital marketing strategies and audience knowledge for specific business types
- Practice in integrating Outbound Social with Inbound Search, together with Email and the Website
- Help pick the right tech, and ‘walk the talk’
- Cultivate a community of interest so that we can learn from wider experience
- Partner with like minded individuals and businesses
Integrated Digital Marketing
What does strategy even mean?
I define it as ‘deciding what will work best before doing it’. By deciding what you will do – and what you won’t – you will make the best use of your resources.
Marketing Definition
The Chartered Institute of Marketing describe it as:
“identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”
The Chartered Institute of Marketing
Defining audiences is a big part of marketing.
We will convert more interest into action by deciding who to work with.
Content Strategy
Keywords. Personalisation. Segmentation. Some amazing opportunities to design content for specific audiences and power results.
I also realise that social content and search content are not the same. It is to do with timing the conversation and the stage your audience is at.
Do we write first and figure it out later?
I can’t help but agree that writing is a perfect way to help dig into any strategic thinking. It can take an awful lot of digging even to articulate the problems to be solved.
If something is too tricky to plan (like the idea for this site), then it can all be reorganised later. The most important thing is to start.