Everyone is different, and the motivations that drive one person to your brand might be totally different to another. Your business might have two, three or umpteen types of customer, each with their own needs, goals and expectations.
As the saying goes, you can’t please everyone – or at least it’s difficult with a singular approach to marketing. To maximise the impact of your blogs, web content and email marketing, it can be helpful to break down your audience into a few key target markets.
Wondering where to start? Let’s explore how you can begin to segment your audience.
Build a selection of user personas
Initially, you’ll have to step back from the business and think carefully about who buys your products/services and why. Do you sell direct to consumers, or do you also work with businesses and resellers? Can you break these down into distinct demographics, like different age groups, locations, professions, roles or income brackets?
Use these insights to begin forming 2-5 user personas, before elaborating on what they want, relative to your own business. You can then get a sense of how different they are. A low-income family living rurally, for instance, would have very different priorities to a young professional in the heart of London.
Narrow down the formats they respond to
It isn’t churlish to say that, as a general rule, certain demographics have certain preferred means of engagement. Young people are big on Snapchat and Instagram. A professional crowd is more drawn to LinkedIn, and email marketing. Executives are more likely to respond to print. And within them, other distinctions may apply…
Who, for example, has more time and inclination to read a blog: a builder or a project manager? Who is more likely to check their inbox regularly? What shared interests do they have, and what makes them distinct?
Likewise, you may have a split in your audience’s level of understanding. Guides and white papers could be great for, say, an IT support company warning regular customers about cyber security. Yet that same brand, targeting its b2b clients, may alternate with quick-fire news updates, as they already have some technical awareness.
Drill into their desires and frustrations
Once you have several profiles to flit between, and a list of their go-to platforms, it’s all down to the content itself. The last hurdle is knowing what they want to read about. It may take some more research. Talk to those in the preferred demographic, and analyse other blogs and web pages in that sector.
Which subjects keep reappearing? How are goals, frustrations and motivations addressed, and how can you touch on them with relevant, engaging content in your own marketing strategy? Such exercises form the crux of web copywriting. They’ll pin your strategy in place, and open doors to original, thought-provoking material.
If you fail to segment an audience, you’ll start to lose one crowd over another, when you can easily have all of them at the altar of your brand. To ensure you maximise brand engagement, gain some copywriting expertise. Contact us to discuss the impact of your blogs, emails and web content, or join us on one of our strategy days to delve deeper into your target markets.