Everything starts with understanding your customer. What drives their decision making process? How do they get their information? What is their age? Gender? Location? What media do they consume? What social media do they use? What are their interests? What are they in the market for? We could probably continue adding questions for a long time. Without this kind of understanding, we cannot develop content, build campaigns around a relevant audience. In this blog, I will look at how targeting a relevant audience plays a game-changing role in your strategy development and I will give an example of a Google Ads campaign that I have implemented personally.
You have to understand your audience before you can speak to them. “Speak” is a keyword here. You need to have a conversation with your potential customers to solve their problems, needs, and bring value to their lives. You need to develop a persona. You cannot reach everyone with your products and/or services so you need to understand your niche. This will help your business to reach your most interested customers. If your business has paid advertising campaigns you definitely do not want to waste your precious dollars. You want to have the best ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) you can. Buyer personas are extremely important to your marketing campaign.
A content marketing strategy is a significant component of B2B marketing. Read 4Element’s blog about B2B “B2B Marketing’s Mystery Unveiled” to learn more about B2B marketing. A cookie-cutter content marketing strategy will not work for a successful strategy. When you are using personas, you can have these benefits for your marketing:
- Your content can evoke more feelings and emotions
- Directly addressing problems that customers are experiencing
- If your products/services can be linked to your customers life goals you will have an advantage
- Dig for special data: A paid search campaign can give you plenty of data especially since keyword bidding is user generated
- Content consumption: Was it shared? Were videos watched to the end? Were there repeat views?
- Opinion mining: Look at customers comments. Look at Twitter for ex. Look at the social platforms
- Get constant feedback from customer service and sales: This can help your business create content that solve problems, which is the “Holy Grail” of content
Google Ads offers many possibilities for audience targeting. Recently, I have had good success with a Google Ads Discovery campaign. Discovery campaigns lets you reach people that might be open to your brands new products and services. People can be reached across YouTube, Discover (showing ads to users related to their web & app activity), and Gmail. I looked at business data going back at least 90 days. Look at where your display conversions came from, i.e. what websites, topics, interests; This will assist you with building audiences around certain affinities and in-market targeting. You can use these data insights to build relevant audiences for your Discovery campaign and increase the intent of your campaign. In addition, look at your best-performing keywords and build a custom audience around the keywords as well. Google Ads allows you to build many customized reports. Make sure to include high-quality images and write your ad copy as if you are having a conversation with your personas. You are not trying to shove a product or service down their throats. You want to cater to their needs and pain points.
There are of course other factors involved like location targeting, audience exclusion, bidding strategy and those are variables that need to be taken care of by an expert. Lastly, the correct conversion goal needs to be set up and everything needs to align with what is in tagged in Google Tag Manager. If not, you need to create the correct tagging. I have seen great ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) with this strategy.
Never underestimate the importance of building the right personas for your campaigns. It’s essential. Data does tell a story but it only tells a good story if the targeting is optimized. I have a strong passion for digital marketing and its universe. If your business needs any help with this, please contact 4Elements Digital here.
For now, have a wonderful summer and contact 4Elements Digital for any questions you might have. I am sending you warm digital marketing greetings from Plano, Texas. Remember, always keep on learning. Cheers!
