One of the core tenets of Inbound Marketing is creating content that has the right message for the right audience at the right time. Targeting is nothing new to marketers but traditionally, targeting has meant trying to reach everyone within a broad demographic or geographic group.
Today, Inbound Marketers understand the value of really refining their targets to a very specific customer persona. By defining your customer groups, segmenting your lists and tailoring your messages to those groups, you can increase your conversion rate exponentially.
We’ve done that exercise here at Weidert Group and have seen the impact.
When we first started implementing Inbound Marketing for our agency, we still had the old mindset that more is better. We even had friendly competition among our team to see which of us could attract more blog viewers. However, we quickly learned that when we focused our messages to our most attractive customer types, we had much higher conversion rates and our qualified prospect numbers grew. It was a bit of a mind-shift for us to realize that even if we got 50% fewer readers in gross numbers but were reaching exactly the right readers, we had a much better chance of success.
We’re not alone in that realization.
In fact, data mining and prospect targeting has become the foundation for nearly all successful marketers. In yesterday’s NY Times, Acxiom Corporation was spotlighted as owning the world’s largest commercial database on consumers. Acxiom has more than 23,000 computer servers continuously collecting and analyzing data. It processes more than 50 trillion data transactions a year and boasts about 1,500 data points per person on more than 500 million active consumers. Their customers can access their best consumer targets based on nearly any demographic, geographic, psychographic or behavioral criteria. Wow!
If paying big data refiners is not in your budget, LinkedIn and Facebook offer tools to reach your best prospects.
LinkedIn Targeted Updates gives marketers the ability to target followers based on specific criteria including industry, seniority, job function, company size, non-company employees and geography. The other new tool, Follower Statistics, provides self-service access to an insights dashboard that offers a window into follower demographics and engagement, such as likes, shares and comments.
Facebook offers a robust targeting tool allowing marketers to segment their lists by:
Want to know more about targeting the right prospects? Download our Step-by-Step Guide to Inbound Marketing.
Topics: Content Marketing, Social Media
