The first step in building an integrated digital marketing campaign is getting to know your target audience. You need to know who your audience is and what their most urgent needs are. When you know that, it becomes easier to communicate effectively with them.
The number one way to know your audience is to LISTEN. The suggestions that follow all revolve around this key activity.
Connect in Real Time
First of all, you need to connect with your target audience in real time. Make calls with your sales reps. Go on ride alongs with your sales team. Take customer service calls. Meet one-on-one with customers and have meaningful, real-time discussions. Listen to their frustrations and their joys. Soak up the way they describe their world.
You can also ask your customers how you’re doing via email, online chat, outbound calls, and targeted campaigns via email and social. You can conduct surveys, focus groups, or even phone interviews, but you really want to connect with them in their home environments.
Social Listening
Second, start social listening. Monitor social media to see what’s resonating and what’s being discussed. Find out who’s talking about your brand, in what capacity, and where. It’s your job to pay attention.
You can also use SEO and keywords analysis to broaden your social listening. Start with the keywords people use to search for solutions. Look for the questions they’re asking, the content they’re sharing, the sites they’re using as sources for info, and the influencers they pay attention to. As you’re listening, keep track of all your insights and share them with everyone in your company.
Go Deep with Data
Dig into your data to find out what your target audience wants from you and determine strategic priorities for your content. For example, if we’re talking email marketing, don’t just look at open rates. Instead, figure out the click-to-view ratio for every article and every promotion in your email. And be sure to watch negative metrics, too. For example, if unsubscribe rates are spiking, you’ll want to take a closer look and find out why.
Monitor your analytics to find out what content gets the most shares, the most visits, and the most subscribers. Analytics tells us how your audience finds your site, what they read, and what most inspires them to convert. Use this data to dictate what content you’ll be producing more of.
It’s a smart idea to conduct a regular survey with your audience to assess the most common issues that keep popping up. You can also split-test different options on your website and in your emails to see what your audience prefers.
Craft Buyer Personas
With the insights you’ve captured in the previous three activities, you can create accurate buyer personas. While they’re not the end-all be-all of knowing your target audience, they’re great for getting everyone on the same page as to whom you’re serving. But in order for buyer personas to work, you need to put in the research to create them.
Buyer personas need to be based on real data, such as website data, buying history, staff insights, customer interviews, and surveys, which you then analyze and translate into meaningful insights you can apply to your business.
And once you’ve created them, be sure to use your buyer personas. You can use them to help identify the right channels, key content types, and devise your strategy. They can also provide inspiration for your creative team as they’re designing landing pages, social campaigns, and copy.
Just be mindful that you don’t come to rely solely on your buyer personas. After all, the very meaning of “persona”— ‘mask’—points to the folly in that practice. Buyer personas are a snapshot of your customers. While it’s helpful tool, it can also be a limiting tool if we lean on them to heavily. Buyer personas should not take the place of connecting with your target audience and learning about the real-life situations in which they find themselves and for which they need solutions.
The key to getting to know your target audience is listening. An integral part of that listening is documenting what you learn. Once you have a regular practice of meeting with your audience where they are at—whether that’s face-to-face or virtually—and intimately understanding what they need, you can use that information toward creating a customer-focused integrated marketing campaign. The better you know your target audience, the more effectively you can create, distribute, and promote content that resonates.
Feeling in the dark about integrated marketing? Get in touch with Filament.
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