The core of inbound marketing is understanding who it is that is coming to you and making sure you are producing the kind of content that interests them. The alternative to audience profiling is a shotgun or generic approach which is unfocused and can be a big energy-waster. If you construct a model of your audience, you have a target you can aim at and you have a kind of amalgam human being you can talk to.
Who’s your audience? Where can you find more of them?
The collection of audience data available to marketers with today’s powerful tools enables you to go a long way toward understanding who would listen when you speak. What are the people in your audience like? How can you find more people like that? That is the question.
In the last week or so, we learned that even trusted and beloved institutions life Facebook has been collecting masses of sophisticated data about its users–data of the very kind you need to understand who your audience is. Facebook seems to have gotten in trouble for the way they handled the data collection and distributed the information. However, the process is a model for the kinds of “data points” that could be available to you for defining your audience.
People scrolling through Facebook find ads so amazingly well aimed at the facts of their lives that they get worried. Advertising from a local florist just in time for your mother’s birthday. Facebook says, “we want the ads people see on Facebook to be interesting useful and relevant.” That’s precisely what you, as a marketer, want as well.
The personal dimensions of your model
In the course of using the internet, everybody reveals a wide variety of facts about themselves. These facts are never lost and can be collected from points all over the internet and incorporated into personal profiles. The range of information includes:
- Location
- Age
- Generation
- Gender and orientation
- Language
- Ethnic affinity
- Education level
- Field of study
- School (or schools)
- Income and net worth
- Home ownership and type
- Home value
- Property size
- Square footage of home
- Year home was built
- Household composition
- And more…
Facebook tracks your onsite activity.
- Pages you like
- Ads you click on
- Your devices
- Location settings
- Brand of your phone
- Kind of internet connection
Facebook’s web tracking reach includes collaborations with major data brokers. Data brokers are businesses that collect information on consumers from all over the internet and from public records ranging from courthouse records to website cookies and loyalty programs. They create ready-made profiles of individuals and sell them to businesses just for target marketing, building audience models.
Creating your customer persona
To create a persona, you have to decide which personal dimensions are relevant to buying your product or service. That means you to analyze a significant sample of those who have visited your site to determine what differentiates buyers from non-buyers. Your customer persona will be a cross-section of those who fall within the categories constructed by your analysis. Once the persona’s qualities are identified, you can begin to construct content likely to be interesting to the person outlined. You can use the detailed information readily available from internet sources to create a detailed persona of a consumer likely to become a customer.
Targeting your messaging to the buyer persona
Once you have constructed a model of a target customer, you can map out the model’s typical buying journey, his or her wants and needs. This knowledge enables you to create content that answers likely customer concerns or interests and provides solutions to their pain points and needs.
Personalization has become a very important marketing principle in this age of vanishing face-to-face selling and increased reliance on the online marketplace. The idea of building a customer persona is to create an atmosphere of the familiar and relevant, similar to the old days of store owners knowing customers face-to-face. Many of the marketing messages addressed to your customer persona may have a hint of friendliness and familiarity in them which could invite personal responses.
Doublejack Marketing brings together great design, usability and search engine optimization to create exceptional website experiences for your target audience. Please contact us to learn more.
