The most important part of building your marketing strategy is determining who you’re trying to target. You need to market to the right audience in order to drive more business. But how do you know who to target? It comes down to two kinds of marketing: Intent marketing versus target marketing.
Intent marketing is focused on the consumer’s intentions, challenges and needs, whereas target marketing is built around demographics, such as location, title and company name. Building out your target audience based on demographics might seem like the easiest route, but you need to keep one thing in mind: not all titles are the same across the board. For example: a client with a marketing manager title at one company might handle everything from social media to email and website development but someone with the same title at another company might only handle social and email. Whereas intent marketing revolves around someone’s thought process and actions. By doing so, when you target someone’s intentions, you’re able to reach all types of titles across the board. If you’re searching for someone that handles email, social media and web development, intent marketing will help you identify prospects that handle all three. So what’s the first step to intent marketing? Start off by building your buyer’s persona.
What's a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. This is built based on a combination of data, demographics, online research and estimated guess. As you move forward with your marketing strategy, starting by building out a buyer’s persona will help you identify what your audience is thinking. This will help you understand what they’re searching for online when they identify a problem they’re trying to solve. Once you build out your persona, you can identify the criteria they look for when picking a product and/or service that meets their needs. Why is this important? It will help you deliver strong, contextual messaging to your ideal customer.
So how do you build out a buyer’s persona?
The first step is to collect data on your customers. You can start off by interviewing current customers and learning about their actions and thought process. Ask them where they get their information from, what keywords do they look for and what their decision process is like. However, before you get carried away, remember: it’s important to keep your personas to a minimum of five so that you don’t lose track of your marketing strategy. Once you have your persona’s built out, it’s time to focus on your buyer’s journey.
Building Out a Buyer's Journey
The buyer’s journey is the route your customer takes from the moment they identify a problem to the moment they decide on a solution. There are three different stages to the buyer’s journey which are:
- Awareness stage- This is the initial stage of the buyer’s journey. During this stage, a customer identifies the need of a problem and is aware that they need to find a solution. They enter the top of the funnel as they initiate the first steps of research.
- Consideration stage- Once a problem is identified, the next step is to evaluate different options. The customer now researches a variety of alternatives and learns more about what the different choices he/she can make.
- Decision stage- On this last step of the buyer’s journey, the customer has all of the information he/she needs in order to make an informed decision.
Each stage in your buyer’s journey should tie into your overall strategy, it’s meant to guide the customer and drive them to the bottom of the sales funnel. Think of this as a map that converts prospects into leads using informative, contextual materials that target each individual.
What Are The Benefits?
Intent marketing has opened the doors to marketers by providing a new approach to a more targeted, and relevant marketing strategy. There are many benefits of intent marketing but the three most important ones are: having a real targeted persona, improving content marketing and optimizing customer engagement. This approach improves results and helps marketers narrow down their marketing strategy for better performance.
- Real targeted persona having a real targeted persona is a huge benefit to intent marketing. As you learn more about your customers, remember to keep updating the persona. The more data you can collect, the more targeted your strategy will be.
- Contextual marketing is a way to guarantee you’re delivering the right message, to the right person at the right time. By creating relevant content, you’re fulfilling your customer’s needs and providing a solution to their problem.
- Optimize for customer engagement Once you have your buyer’s personas built out, you can use data to optimize your content.
Intent marketing is the best way to make the best out of your content and marketing strategy. Picture it as a great way to get in front of your audience at the right time with the right content. It’s important to gather data and implement it onto your plan for better results.
Do you want to learn more about how Revenue River can help with intent marketing?
