Determining the Right Marketing Strategy for Your Target Audience

There are so many roads to travel in marketing. Many companies find themselves camping out at the fork in the road rather than taking a step in one direction.

Target audience, budget, content creation capacities, ethics, business goals, the size of a company, or the brand’s popularity are all considered when determining a company’s marketing strategy. Or, at least, they should be. 

This article will help you determine the right marketing strategy for your particular target audience. But first, let’s explore a few different marketing types and how they might work out for various brands.

Email Marketing

Email marketing done right generates one of the highest returns on investment you’ll see among all the types of marketing out there. But people are cautious with their email addresses these days. It’ll take a lot more than asking for an email address to get one.

Email marketing expenses can add up quickly. You need an email marketing platform to optimise your efforts. You also may have to hire additional help to create and manage email content.

The good thing is that small brands can start slow. It’s always an option to scale your supporting software and content creation capabilities as your subscriber list grows.

Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail campaigns are all about engaging customers offline. Companies send out postcards, flyers, packages, print mailers, swag, and other products directly to customers’ mailboxes. Sending your target audience products they can touch and feel is a great way to stand out in a digital world.

Note that brands with bigger budgets usually have more room to experiment with direct mail campaigns. 

Digital Marketing

Small, medium, and large brands can take advantage of digital marketing. You can deploy a solid marketing strategy regardless of your budget and resources. Opportunities to connect with customers are limitless. Additionally, you can experiment with ways to drive conversions on digital platforms.

For example, you can create a free profile on any top social media platform and grow your presence organically with high-quality content, consistency, and intentional engagement. You can take your social media presence a step further with influencer marketing.

In addition to social media, you could create a professional website. Then, build a blog on that website, optimise it for search engines, and have another way to pull your target audience.

The brands that use a combination of paid and organic tactics in their digital marketing strategies typically generate the best results. 

Unconventional Marketing Routes

There are also unconventional marketing routes that can fare well with any-sized brand.

Guerrilla marketing, for example, is when a business puts things like stickers or company swag in high-traffic physical locations to generate buzz around their brand.

It isn’t “the biggest budget wins” for unconventional marketing routes. It’s more like “the best strategy, content creation team, and how well you know your target audience wins.”

Choosing the Right Marketing Strategy for Your Target Audience

Here are five tips for creating a marketing strategy tailored to your unique target audience:

Define your target audience

Before creating any part of your marketing strategy, you must define your target audience and get to know them.

To create emotional connections through your marketing, study the following about your target audience:

• Demographic information
• Pain points, challenges, and curiosities
• Favourite social media platforms and how they engage on them
• Favourite media types
• The kind of content they’re attracted to
• Their core values
• How individuals go about their day-to-day
• Their dreams and goals and how they envision life

It’s also wise to take a deeper look at marketing types and channels that resonate best with your target audience.

Study marketing types and channels

Knowing which marketing types and channels your target audience loves is good. But that’s only part of the job. The other part is studying those marketing types and channels to understand why your target audience engages with them the most.

Doing so helps you figure out which ones to prioritise in your marketing strategy at the start. Of course, you won’t be able to do everything right away.

So, educate yourself on why your target audience likes certain marketing types. Study why they engage on specific marketing channels versus others. Then, you can start forming a marketing strategy that focuses on the kind of marketing most likely to resonate with your target audience.

Carefully consider content

When determining the right marketing strategy for your target audience, you must think about what kind of content you’ll be required to create. Also, you must consider the resources available to you for the content creation process.

For example, let’s say you plan to make email marketing a significant part of your marketing strategy. In that case, you’ll want to think about email design in detail. Your email design should be consistent. It should represent your brand voice, messaging, and visual elements. More importantly, your target audience should be at the forefront of your design decisions.

The question becomes: Can I produce high-quality email content that resonates with my target audience, who’s available to help me do it, and how will I keep up with the demand?

Think about your content creation capacities before committing to a marketing strategy. It’s noble to want to include seven different marketing types in your overarching strategy. But do you have the resources and team to produce high-quality content for them?

Furthermore, careful consideration of content obligations is critical because you have to be able to keep up with the level of experimentation necessary for a successful marketing strategy.

Don’t be afraid to experiment

You won’t get everything right the first time with your marketing strategy. It takes time to put together the right mix of marketing types, platforms, channels, content, and media that will resonate best with your target audience. That’s where experimentation comes in.

Experiment responsibly, though. For example, instead of starting a profile on every social media platform, find out the top five social media platforms among your target audience.

Then, create a presence on the top two. Once you’re getting good results from those platforms, you can build another one into your social media marketing strategy.

Experiment, but give your strategy time to generate results before switching things up.

Lastly, whatever marketing strategy you decide on must be transparent and inclusive.

Always be transparent and inclusive

No matter the marketing strategy you choose for your target audience, transparency and inclusivity must be at the forefront. By keeping accessibility, diversity, and inclusion at the core of your marketing, you’re more likely to inspire the strong connection you’re hoping for with your entire target audience.

Ask your customers to tell their unique stories and experiences with your brand. Use diverse images and video content. In addition, ensure each of your marketing channels provides an exceptional user experience no matter the background or ability of the user.

Ultimately, your target audience is diverse. Therefore, your marketing strategy should reflect that diversity to honour and appreciate everyone in your customer base.

Conclusion

Getting favourable results from your marketing strategy relies on choosing the right one for your target audience.

Ample research on your target audience, different marketing types, and platforms will help you determine the best marketing strategy for your customer base and business goals. Also, carefully consider the content you must create to power your marketing strategy.

Lastly, experiment with your marketing strategy and remain transparent and inclusive in all you do.