Marketing to your ideal audience isn’t a walk in the park. First, you need to craft your perfect personna, outlining their wants, needs, and challenges. Then, you need to look at where these audiences are from a search and social perspective. This will help you pinpoint them in the massive world wide web. Finally, you need to layer your personna’s attributes with segments that best align with their values and lifestyle.
Newer technologies allow you to narrow your target market to your ideal customer, layering in demographic, behavioral, interest, and purchase readiness segments. But this technology doesn’t determine if your audience is actually being reached. Another step is required to know if your persona is indeed being reached in the most efficient way. Here’s how to ensure you’re reaching your target market.
1. People Are Reading and Engaging With Your Content
Are people actually reading the content that your team is producing? So much effort and so many resources go into creating this content. Because of this, you want it to be informative and educational. To see how your content is performing, start by checking specific metrics. Page views is the number of times a particular page on your site is visited. This metric will show you the overall popularity of the content and signal how you’re doing from an SEO perspective.
Average time spent will show you how long an individual is spending on the page consuming your content. A high average time spent means that your content is engaging and also worthwhile for your target audience. Scroll depth is related to average time spent, as it shows how far down an individual got on your page. Alternatively, high bounce rate references how quickly a user leaves your page. It can tell you whether your audience found it uninteresting or not useful.
There are general benchmarks for each of these metrics, however there is no one-size-fits all for every business. Metrics largely depend on how long your site has been live as well as the kinds of content you are producing. While it’s hard to know how you are stacking up against your competitors, there are tools to help you create more engaging content from the start. A competitive content analysis tool, for instance, allows you to maximize on your competitors’ weaknesses. It will point out what you can write about to fill any content gaps, providing your audience with the information they are searching for.
2. You’ve Established Brand Familiarity Amongst Your Target Audience
Brand familiarity isn’t as widely discussed as brand awareness, however it’s an important factor in ensuring you’re reaching your target audience. Someone who is familiar with your brand can easily recognize it, which may influence their preference toward it. This is opposed to brand awareness, which refers to when someone knows that your brand merely exists. Brand familiarity is established over time through consistent branding and targeted marketing.
Familiarity can begin when someone sees an ad for your business on their social media feed. Then, one of their favorite influencers posts about your brand, talking about your products and offering a discount code for new purchasers. After this interaction, perhaps the individual comes across your brand in real life in a store window or as a recommendation from their friend. This simple example is a strong case of how brand familiarity can develop organically over time.
One of the easiest ways to account for brand familiarity is to ask purchasers directly. A questionnaire pop-up on your site after an individual makes a purchase can ask buyers how they discovered your brand. Another way to measure brand familiarity is through social listening. Social media management tools can pull data on how many times your brand is mentioned and on which platforms.
3. Your Marketing Efforts Are Generating Conversions
One of the main purposes of marketing is to generate conversions. You want consumers to be so enticed by your advertising that they make a purchase. Now, this doesn’t always happen with the first bite. As mentioned before, it can take some time to establish both brand awareness and brand familiarity. Yet, if you’re seeing an increase in conversions after a marketing launch, you know that what you’re doing is working.
Conversions are typically thought of as purely sales, however there are other types of conversions in marketing. A user that signs up for your newsletter is a conversion as is someone who fills out an interest form on your site. This customer information is valuable first party data owned by your company. You can refine your targeting efforts to retarget users who have already made a conversion on your site. These customers are further down the funnel and are therefore more likely to make future conversions, such as a purchase.
One of the easiest ways to see how your marketing tactics are performing from a conversion standpoint is by calculating the conversion rate. This metric is simply the total number of conversions divided by the total number of clicks. Anything between 2% and 5% is considered “good,” but of course yours may vary based on industry. Determining your conversion rate after a new marketing launch can be helpful in knowing how well it’s performing. It can also let you know which of your tactics is leading to the biggest ROI.
Conclusion
Knowing if you’re reaching your target audience will help you stand out from your competitors. You’ll know what’s working and what you need to do differently. A generalized targeting strategy doesn’t work in today’s world with so many brands entering the market every day. Marketing smarter will allow you to further engage your ideal audience and improve your ROI.
