Targeting: How To Find The Right People UK

Targeting a message to a generic 35-year-old middle-class working mother of two can be quite challenging. It’s far more straightforward to target a message to someone like Jennifer, who has two children under four, works as a paralegal, and is always on the lookout for quick yet healthy dinners, as well as ways to spend more time with her children and less on household chores.

—Elizabeth Gardner

The World Wide Web has made our world increasingly interconnected. It has allowed businesses to gather a growing wealth of information about their customers. This close connection and detailed data are enhancing every company’s ability to market digitally to targeted consumers. In other words, digital marketing campaigns can now be crafted to cater specifically to certain individuals, making marketing more effective than ever. The following delves into the specifics of this approach and how to achieve it successfully:

Where Targeting Fits Into Marketing’s Big Picture

At its essence, target marketing involves reaching out to a specific, desired market. This precision requires two key steps:

1. Identifying who the target customer is and what market segment they belong to.
2. Designing a campaign that markets the appropriate product at the ideal price with the most appealing promotions through the marketing channels most likely to reach the target customer.

It’s important to remember that targeting is just one aspect of a marketing strategy. For most companies, marketing involves much more than defining a target customer and then creating a tailored campaign for that niche audience. Similarly, marketing is just one part of a broader business strategy aimed at boosting product or service sales. Every aspect of a business’s operations needs to be refined and optimised. This includes the product or service itself, the supply chain, customer experience, back-office operations, sales, and more.

Defining the ‘Right Person’

As mentioned earlier, developing a detailed customer persona is the first step towards a successful targeted marketing campaign. To begin creating this persona, conduct research, interviews, and surveys. This can involve current customers, as well as individuals who fit the target customer profile but are not yet customers. Competitor customer information can also be a useful reference. Ensure your interviews or surveys include at least three people and cover their professional roles, goals, challenges, personal backgrounds, shopping preferences, and their preferred methods of networking and communication. To gain valuable insights, ask ‘why’ after most questions.

Once you have gathered all the details, you can start piecing together the persona. There are four main elements to include:

1. Basic demographic information: Career and family background, income, location, gender, age, and personal identifiers such as communication preferences and demeanour. For example, ‘male, 30-35, academic (e.g., lecturer, researcher), £40,000, north-east England, married with young children, prefers email communication, straightforward and professional’.
2. Motivations: Goals, challenges, and ways to help achieve those goals or overcome challenges. For example, ‘subscribes to a magazine to learn about a new subject area but struggles to find time to read it’.
3. Real customer quotes and objections: Quotes from interviews and any objections they may have regarding the service or product. For example, ‘“I like to buy items that improve my life…I just don’t know if this monthly expense fits within my family’s budget.”
4. Marketing messaging: How the product or service should be presented to the customer persona, including an elevator pitch. For example, ‘All the essentials you need, streamlined for your convenience’.

Targeting Platforms

LinkedIn

LinkedIn stands out as an exceptional platform for business-to-business marketing. On LinkedIn, there are four primary methods for targeted marketing. Setting up these ads is straightforward, with LinkedIn guiding you through the process to target your audience based on location, age, gender, profession, and even email addresses from your contact list.

1. PPC Advertising: Allows businesses to use videos, images, and text to reach targeted audiences. This method is ideal for boosting brand awareness, increasing website visits, and generating leads. For instance, if you want small business marketers to see your latest marketing software, a PPC video ad can showcase its simplicity.
2. InMail Advertising: Provides a more personal approach by delivering messages directly to the LinkedIn mailboxes of your target audience. For example, you could send an InMail ad with a free trial code to entice senior executives.
3. Display Ads: Similar to PPC ads but for even more specific content—ideal for updates on your LinkedIn company page. For example, if you’re hosting a conference on SEO techniques, you can advertise it to local professionals.
4. Sponsored Posts: These appear in users’ home feeds as soon as they log in, making it a great method to showcase new products.

Facebook

Conversely, Facebook is best for business-to-customer marketing. It is highly user-friendly and effective, with Facebook guiding you through ad setup similarly to LinkedIn.

1. Ads Create Tool: Allows marketers to develop ads that meet specific criteria, including targeted actions and creative options.
2. Facebook Offers: Enables you to promote special discounts or raffles to targeted customers. These can be shared on Facebook walls or privately, expanding marketing reach.
3. Boosted Posts: Help businesses reach beyond their existing page likes. For a modest fee, any Facebook page post can be promoted to appear in the newsfeeds of targeted customers—ideal for promoting new products or events.

Facebook’s ability to define target personas is exceptional, with its ads reaching 89% of the intended audience compared to the 38% average of most platforms. This is achieved through boosted posts and special Facebook offers.

Other effective targeting platforms include Instagram, Google, Bing, Pinterest, Twitter, Spotify, and Pandora. Each offers a range of targeting options, providing flexibility for various marketing campaigns.

Remarketing

In simple terms, remarketing involves re-engaging customers who have previously shown significant interest in your brand. This can include lifecycle marketing, shopping cart abandonment reminders, and cross-sell or upsell ads.

Remarketing works by connecting your company website to a digital marketing platform. Most platforms offer this capability so that when individuals visit your site and leave, your advertisements will begin appearing on their Instagram, Google searches, Facebook, and more. By embedding a small piece of code on your website, you ensure your brand remains prominent to recent visitors. For example, if someone browsed purses on your site, the most viewed purse can be advertised on other sites they visit. Research from institutions like MIT shows that such targeted campaigns can significantly boost customer conversion rates.

For Example…

If a business sells kitchen appliances and wants to start target marketing, their initial step would be to design the persona. They could create personas for contractors who build new homes, those who restore or renovate older properties, and homeowners or prospective buyers. For contractors, LinkedIn campaigns such as InMail ads could directly reach them. For homeowners looking to sell, Facebook could be used to offer discounts on kitchen renovations. The same principles apply to other targeting platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

ThinkClever