What does your audience expect from you?
For every marketer, knowing the audience is the first step toward success. However, more often than not, defining your audience in business terms doesn’t mean that you can design a strategy to engage with potential customers. In fact, you’d be surprised to know that too many marketers get stuck at the first stage of planning, a.k.a. they fail to acknowledge the many requirements of their target group. The thing about your audience is that you can’t just throw any marketing campaign at them and hope that one will stick. A strategy builds to the right target also needs to master the basic rules of interaction.
You’ve lost control of your marketing campaign
When search engine marketing campaigns were first launched, the idea was to maximize a budget to reach out to a new audience who, otherwise, wouldn’t know about your company. Scroll back several years later, and AdWords is now offering a variety of paid advertising options: Text ads, display, video (via YouTube) and even remarketing campaigns. However, with the diversity of options, the tool has also gained high management complexity. Any company looking to make the most of their budget creates, on average, several hundreds of highly targeted campaigns. That means that without an automated solution, managing the totally of your narrow targets becomes a full-time job for an entire team – Learn more about popular Adwords automation tools here. If you can’t manage your targeted campaigns in real time, you’re likely to miss changes in audience groups.
You don’t share anything relevant
The opposite strategy, to manage the content you publish – whether it’s ads or web pages –, is to reject all audience-related diversification. Focusing your energy on generic content ensures that what you publish is relevant to everybody, and consequently to nobody. Indeed the creation of tailored and informative content that matches each specific target group allows a business to stand out from the crowd. That’s precisely why content marketing is such a powerful but time-demanding tool.
You don’t respond
Your customers get in touch over social media. 81% of customers believe that handling complaints in the public sphere is what makes a brand more accountable. Consequently, when a user reaches out on Twitter, Facebook or any other social platform, they expect an answer. Companies can’t afford to ignore the interaction; it is, after all, visible to all users. Failing to respond – with 24 hours on weekend and a couple of hours during opening hours – affect the trust people put in your brand.
You don’t understand their values
Who’s your audience? More and more companies choose to invest time and money in an in-depth demographic review. Indeed, audience groups can not only be defined in terms of age, gender, and social status, but they also share common and modern values you can’t ignore. Environmentally-friendly customers, ethical buyers, and gender inequality fighters are emerging tendencies of a 21st-century audience. A business that fails to address these values can suffer backlash on the market.
The bottom line is that your audience has high expectations. Not only do they want to receive highly relevant communication – meaning companies need to get the right tools and mindset to deliver –, but they also need to feel that they’re appreciated by the company.
