consumer targeting Archives - Crocus Communications

A good product, and an effective marketing campaign, always starts from a thorough understanding of your WHO, your target audience.

Of course, your product or service is amazing and you want as many people as possible to benefit from it, so why limit yourself by defining a specific target?

Well, getting specific in defining a target audience means that you can address the problems that they are facing, it means that you can speak to them in a way that will resonate with them, and it means that you can target them in a time- and cost-effective way.

How specific do you need to get?

Well, last week I heard about a business targeting women seeking happiness … who want to do yoga during their ‘time of the month’. The woman who created this business is, understandably, the leader in this niche and making a six-figure income as a result.

So how can you go about identifying your target audience?

As a startup or small business, you’re not going to have the big budgets to spend on focus groups and statistical research – but the good news is that there’s still plenty you can do without this. Here are 5 steps from shopper marketing expert Eveline Bettels to get you started…

5 steps to identifying and building on your target audience – by shopper marketing expert Eveline Bettels

1) Be clear on both the shopper and the consumer

The consumer and the shopper can be two different people. For example, when it comes to toys: the end consumer is the child but the shopper is actually the parent, most likely the mother. Your toy marketing should include some message to the shopper to convince her to buy your product, whilst making the toy itself desirable and fun for the kids (obviously!).

Where these are different, you will want to target both the shopper and the consumer. This is the case, for example, when it comes to gifting at key consumption periods such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. Your ‘who’, and therefore your message, will be different at different ‘touch points’.

2) Look at the demographics of your potential target

Consider factors such as age, gender, social status, education, location, and so on. For instance, if you’re offering financial tax advice: whom are you going after? Are you targeting people with a simple one-income, no-kids household, or a married couple, double income, with two kids and a mortgage?

Once you have identified that, try to understand their concerns and possible needs in order to provide solutions to their problems. In the end, your product or service has to be relevant to their needs in the moment, and connect them to the answers that they’re looking for.

In the example of financial tax advice: A young family doesn’t necessarily have the time or knowledge to do this kind of tax calculation and your advice would be making something that is complex and time consuming very quick and easy for them. Hence, your marketing could be about how problem solving will lead to something even better (e.g. less hassle, more family quality time).

In the case of the toys example, try to understand the concerns of today’s parents, the shoppers: they may want to give children educational toys, made of sustainable material, without any harmful chemicals, and so on. Think of where they would be researching these topics and what the current search terms are within that category.

3) Think where and how you want to sell your product or service

What’s the right channel for your product or service? Purely online, or is it better to have face to face time with the client? The latter may be the case especially for highly emotional categories where personal advice is preferred, like cosmetics, skin care, fragrances, but also career advice, and so on.

Wherever you choose to be present, don’t underestimate the business-driving power of the internet. Even if you’re only selling offline, a nice website and the right ranking on a search results page can drive your brand awareness significantly. Also think about how the customer journey will bounce back and forth between online and offline.

When it comes to online, where exactly are your customers active? There’s no point in writing beautiful articles on your blog if your target audience is never going to read them! You can make some assumptions here based on age and gender, for example, Millennials are often found on Instagram and Snapchat, Pinterest has a largely female audience.

Today, mobile marketing is also a key enabler for driving brand awareness. 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphones.*

In essence, you have to anticipate the moments when and where potential future clients may interact with your brand or product, and then commit to being there to help answering their needs.

*Google Consumer Survey in the US, August 2015

4) Keep in mind today’s digital technology

Today’s technology allows anybody to be connected, at anytime, and anywhere in the world; make sure you’re present where your target is.

With an ever-growing smartphone penetration, shopping as we once knew it has evolved tremendously. Shoppers want to want to know, go, and buy swiftly. Your brand presence has to be appealing, fast and frictionless.

Thanks to social media, consumers have nowadays become key brand ambassadors. Use them to your advantage and respond equally to negative impressions. If somebody tweets something bad about your brand, product or services, respond immediately and prevent a negative spiral that will give you a bad word of mouth.

By the way, the number one key purchase influencer for any category is still family and friends – before any advertising or in-store communication. It’s the connection and exchange between family and friends that has changed, i.e. massively increased.

5) Do your research

You may not have the big budgets that big companies have to do quantitative research or fancy focus groups but there are still plenty of ways in which you can do effective research. Here are some ideas:

Leverage your own circle of friends and family for feedback. There are free online questionnaires that you can create and send out (e.g. Zoomerang, Survey monkey, etc.).
If you want to get unbiased comments and insights, you could potentially work with schools or universities and get them to do the research for you as a project.
Depending on the client relationship, you may want to bounce some ideas with a handful of loyal clients or consumers. Make sure you reward them for their opinion and time; make them feel that they’re part of something important.
Using your website, you can test and learn real time for a given period of time. Do a pre-/post- scenario, or simultaneous A/B test, and assess the immediate impact.
Use free tools that are available online: Google Analytics, Google Trends and Think with Google are just a few examples. Consultancies also regularly publish articles on various topics: for example, BCG, Deloitte, Harvard Business Review, etc.

These days, most of the calls I receive on my landline – yes, I still have a landline – are those automated calls from 0845 numbers. You know the ones: voice activated, so that when you (or your machine) pick up, they start playing a pre-recorded marketing message. The cost to that business of blasting the entire population of the UK with such messages is negligible, so that even a very poor response rate will still make the activity worthwhile for them. As consumers, we find these calls incredibly irritating and invasive. As marketers, though, we’re likely to be guilty of using that same approach.

Many of us are still sticking with that old school method of blasting out mass marketing messages at people who may or may not care about what we’re telling them. We might be using modern tools to do it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s more effective. This is most obvious with banner advertising that interrupts your online activities, but the one-way broadcasting approach is also still being used on other channels including social media, email marketing, and paid search…

Social Networks

We all know that we have to ‘do social’ these days. Unfortunately, it doesn’t follow that we’re doing it effectively. We broadcast the same message across Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter. We post too often on Facebook, leading to the algorithm punishing us for low engagement rates or, worse, our fans getting annoyed and ‘unliking’ us. We push out salesy tweets that spam our followers’ feeds and, again, lead them to unfollow us. And we fail to realise the true value of social media, which lies in actually listening to our fans, to the online community, and tapping into what they care about rather than simply shouting about our product.

Email

Some companies can get away with regular email blasts. Supermarkets are an obvious example, given the frequency of our food shopping needs – I shop at least once a week at Ocado, so their special offers are quite relevant and not too annoying. Another example is Amazon, not because we necessarily need to shop there regularly but because they are so damn good at serving you content that is relevant to you based on your previous purchases. Most brands, however, are not in this fortunate position.

Not long ago, I received an email from a stationery brand congratulating me on the very special birth of my child. A major targeting #fail, which of course they had to apologise for. (It turned out that this email had gone out to their entire distribution list. Oops.) Perhaps an extreme example of wrong targeting, but even without such mistakes many brands will send out generic email blasts to their customers. At best, they will be ignored; at worst, the user will unsubscribe and the company will lose its direct means of communicating with that customer.

Paid Search

The temptation of paid search is that we can throw money at high-volume search terms and get huge spikes in traffic in a short period of time. To what end? How many of those new visitors are actually going to be interested in your product? How many will ever buy? Just take a look at the amount of time these people are spending on your site, the number of pages they are viewing, the bounce rate (the percentage of users leaving after only seeing that one landing page), and you may think twice about the value of such unqualified traffic.

So what do all these digital marketing tactics have in common? Failure to identify your objectives and your target audience, failure to understand what they are interested in and how you can meet that need or desire, failure to listen and engage. Would you rather have 100,000 Facebook fans that you have bought or 1,000 fans that you have earned organically and each of whom is a strong advocate of your brand? Would you rather have one million visitors to your website, almost all of whom leave within seconds of landing there, or 10,000 visitors who come back again and again to engage with your content and buy your products?

The answer, then, lies in a more targeted approach to online marketing. This means understanding the demographics and lifestyle choices of your target market, segmenting them in a meaningful way, identifying specific messages that will resonate with each segment and distributing those messages on the right platform at the right time. Yes, it requires a bit more effort and analysis at the start; but it will help you to focus your activities in a much more effective and efficient way. So that, when you get a response to your message, that response will take you one step closer to achieving your business goals – without annoying the whole population of the UK to do so.

Getting clear on your target audience: 5 tips from a shopper marketing expert