Targeting your perfect audience: How to use data to improve your marketing success

“If you know the type of person most likely to convert, why not just talk to them rather than waste time, energy, and money talking to people who quite simply don’t care?”

by Ben Walker

You have a product, you have a budget, and you have a message. These three things can create a delicate interplay to keep costs low and return on investment as high as possible. Without a strategy, budgets can stretch indefinitely and become a somewhat disguised running cost without reaching the right people and without bringing the right people in.

Fundamentally, you need to match your message and your product with your ideal consumers. The internet, households, and mobile phones can be a huge void to scream into and without refinement, your budget might limit your reach, actually excluding your perfect audience. So, how do you get your message, brand, and product directly into the lives of your perfect audience?

Data-driven marketing strategy

Data. Data. Data. We live in the age of information and data makes the world go round. That can be overwhelming when you begin, but the best data-driven strategy gets better and better with every campaign as you, your systems, and your colleagues iterate based on what does and doesn’t work.

So, first of all, don’t panic! Instead of seeing the void of data staring back at you, ready for a budget, see that void as containing the information you need to create very successful marketing campaigns. You may not strike gold first time, but it’s there, waiting.

Knowing your brand, knowing your product, and knowing your audience gives you a leg up because you can match who is buying your product and what they’re saying about it with the data-void. So, research, ask questions, view your service curiously and put yourself in the shoes of your consumer.

When you’re adding people into the mix, customers, potential customers, and non-customers, use that to frame and develop your understanding of your data. It’s easy for two or more people to look at the same information and interpret vastly different conclusions, and data bias¹ is a real possibility. Therefore, looking at what your audience is saying when you’re investigating and objectively applying that to your datasets is critical.

Demographically refined marketing

Data isn’t just campaign success, budget, numbers, return on investment, however. Data can also represent the individuals and trends in your audience. If you have a niche, you’ll want to market to those most interested in that niche with minimal wastage.

For example, some people absolutely love cats, others are wrong. If you’re running a campaign relating to cats, those who aren’t interested in them won’t interact with your message or relate to it.

Refining your marketing reach using demographics is a great way to improve your return on investment and decrease your spend simultaneously. If you’re selling medication or accessibility aids, you might want to refine your marketing to an older market, where if you’re selling dogfood, you might only want to market to those who own dogs (one would hope).

This is where you can kickstart your data collection and process refinement as demographics give your data a head start. You’ll know the reach and type of person that loves your product and, therefore, that’s the best place to start experimenting and slowly improving your strategies.

Geotargeted marketing

Geotargeted marketing is another way to get your strategies underway. Using your knowledge of your audience can influence this strategy, too. If you have a niche need, product, service, or audience, you might consider a direct mail or programmatic online advertising campaign. If your brand is something everyone loves, lucky you, you might consider a door drop or wider geotargeted advertising campaign.

In other words, you can limit your marketing spend using audience demographics and/or using geographies to shift your budget downwards and target a smaller sample size. If you’re a small business owner with a couple of branches and a much more physical presence, it’ll be most beneficial to your marketing campaign to target postcodes surrounding that presence.

What is great is the interaction between the two, however. Each household will contain a person with interests, likes, dislikes, pet peeves, and preferences, and each postcode is made up of those households. If you want to get to know who responds to your marketing a little more, you can run separate postcode-level marketing campaigns and extract characteristics from which postcodes were more successful than others.

The reverse is also true, thanks to indexing. If you know your audience is largely over the age of 65 and across the UK but still want to limit your marketing spend and strategies, you can target the postcodes with the highest indexes (the largest proportions) of over 65s, or you can exclude those postcodes with the lowest proportion of over 65s.

Using marketing technologies

So, how? How do you get a “way in” to access this data? Quite simply, you can use marketing technologies that already have data packaged up. Google ads, for example, has in-built geotargeting and demographic targeting capabilities.

Marketing technologies are built on data and distribution and they simplify how you can get your message to those that want to read it and interact with it the most. Automation and consolidation is the future, too, so more and more these technologies will integrate with each other, giving you single processes that reach multiple streams and outreach strategies.

Precision Connects, for example, has demographic-based data on over 27 million households, too, which you can use to refine your marketing campaigns. Using Connects, you can fine tune your targeting by choosing postcodes or other geographies and refining your targeting by filtering through categories such as age range and salary ranges.

Marketing technologies allow you to fine down your targeting greatly, then help you reach that audience with your artwork quickly and with various automations driving your campaigns. It means that your message gets to those that are most likely to convert, rather than spending a lot of money to reach those people alongside countless others.

Multi and omnichannel strategies

So, what about reaching your audience again and again? Automation and data allow for simple and effective multi and omnichannel strategies, whether this data is first or zero party data. If you are sending out a mailing to a number of households, you can place a QR code onto your artwork, then collect sign ups and form submission on a landing page while also retargeting either only those who have scanned your QR, only those who haven’t scanned, or even only those who scanned your QR and didn’t submit a form.

Instead of thinking about multiple channels as a way to reach more people, which yes, it’s great at doing, another good way of looking at it is a way of reaching the same people multiple times through multiple different touch points. More visibility and interactions with your brand have been proven to increase the likelihood of a conversion².

If you know the type of person most likely to convert, why not just talk to them rather than waste time, energy, and money talking to people who quite simply don’t care?

Marketing technologies can help with this, too, as multichannel campaigns can be automated, whether that’s in terms of outreach channels or in terms of translating your artwork from a postcard to a meta post.

To find out more about how Precision can help you reach your perfect audience, and reach them with your message in the most effective and targeted way possible, you can contact the team at getintouch@precision.co.uk or call us on 01284 718900. Get in touch today to get your product, brand, and message directly into the lives of your customers.

¹ https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/resources/articles/data/5-common-bias-affecting-your-data-analysis

² https://b2bmarketing.net/archive/the-marketing-rule-of-7-and-why-its-still-relevant-in-b2b-b2b-marketing-2/