(Re)focus your marketing in 3 steps

Tightly Define Your Audience or Customer, Focus On Where Your Audience is Targeted with the Advertisement, and Focus on the landing page after the click.

by | Oct 7, 2020

This is for all of the entrepreneurs out there. Are you just starting your business and not sure where to begin? Or have you already established your business but aren’t getting to where you want to be? Let’s dive right in so we can get you on the right path to success!  

Digital marketing should be one of your biggest focuses for your business. This is how you are going to get your product or service viewed by an audience.

Not just anybody, we want to make sure that you are targeting the right demographic, and then convert that potential audience into customers, clients, donors, and fans. Here are three steps to get (re)focused and make progress towards your goals. 

Step 1: Tightly Define Your Audience or Customer

Let’s start with defining your audience. If you don’t have this narrowed down yet, you need to stop whatever you are doing. This is such an important detail in the planning of your business. 

Don’t know how to figure out your target audience? Well first, you need to think about who is going to buy your product or service. The target audience is a demographic that shares similarities, such as age, location, or socioeconomic status.

By narrowing your audience, you will be able to produce a clear marketing message that will appeal to the demographic you want to reach. 

Step 2: Focus On Where Your Audience is Targeted with the Advertisement

Currently, there are so many social media platforms and channels to advertise online, but posting on all of them can become too much all at once for you as the business owner.

You may ask, how do I decide which platform to produce ads on first? Ultimately, this leads back to your target audience and the product or service you are selling. 

Instagram: Most all advertisements you see on Instagram are images that are grabbing the attention of target consumers. This platform has many users and it’s best to know who you want to target with your product or service. If it doesn’t relate to the Instagram user, they aren’t going to even click on your advertisement.

LinkedIn: If your product or service is more business related, you are going to want to check out LinkedIn. LinkedIn is filled with career and business professionals looking to make connections with those that are just like them. You may have a business that provides information on how to become an entrepreneur, this content would be great for a LinkedIn ad.

Facebook: This social media platform has one of the biggest user bases. There are so many people you can reach on Facebook, but with that, there comes a lot of noise. This is when your target audience is most crucial. In order to weed out those that won’t resonate with your advertisement, you need to be able to define the group of people you want to focus on the most. Facebook can help you out with the defining process, but you want to be able to have a few target audiences in mind so that you aren’t just throwing money into ads to see what sticks. Because most people will need to see your ad several times before they click, having a smaller audience increases the frequency your ads are seen, and the likelihood they will click.

Step 3: Focus on the landing page after the click

Do you ever click on an advertisement and the landing page had nothing to do with what you saw? This is why it’s important to make sure that your ad is taking your audience to an area where it clearly shows them what your business does or what you are trying to sell — and makes it easy to take action.

This is going to help keep those directed to your page engaged and staying on your website longer. Make sure the landing page isn’t your home page, but a page that has a clear call to action.

Don’t pay for clicks if you don’t have a good idea of what happens next. Follow-through with your audience and build a landing page that works.

Target the audience and the platform, then follow-through to convert your audience. Easier said than done right? Let’s look at a couple of examples where brands did this well.

Example #1: ZipRecruiter

What does it look like when a brand or product gets this right? Here’s a couple of examples.

I am sure everyone has heard about ZipRecruiter. This ad popped up on my Facebook trying to grab my attention to use their platform to hire new talent.

They were targeting someone who was in the process of hiring or had interest in hiring. I personally have been hiring candidates and ZipRecruiter was pushing this ad to me on a platform that I spend a lot of time on.

In the second image, this is the landing page where I was taken:

Let’s analyze the positives of this landing page. It first asks how many employees I currently have, and when I select the drop down option, it directs me to a page to create an employer account.

Once I started scrolling through the landing page, I was provided with information about how ZipRecruiter works, testimonials and facts about the hiring process. Also, there was contact information if I had further questions.

ZipRecruiter’s landing page provided plenty of information so that I didn’t have to go looking for it throughout their website. This is a great example of serving an ad to a targeted audience on a targeted platform and sending the visitor to a landing page that helped them complete a call to action.

Example #2: Michael Hyatt

Another advertisement that came up on Facebook was a training course called Get Published by Michael Hyatt.

The ad is targeting writers that want to publish a book, and Michael Hyatt pledges to provide the step-by-step process to achieve this goal.

After clicking on the ad, I arrived on a landing page providing endless amounts of information.

First, there is a link to enroll in the course, then testimonials and a preview of the course content, concluding with FAQs.

If I was unsure about enrolling in the course, by the time I make it through the landing page for Get Published, I am going to most likely enroll because I now know my money is going towards something that will benefit me personally.

ZipRecruiter and Michael Hyatt are robust companies with a lot of resources to create content, pages, ads, and more so don’t be intimidated by the amount of detail they put into their ads and landing pages. Rather, be inspired by the example that you can apply to your own marketing. 

Don’t get lost in the noise. Don’t scatter your limited time and energy across a thousand marketing tactics. Focus on your audience, introduce them to your product, and watch your efforts take off.

Have you found a marketing strategy especially successful — or maybe one especially terrible? Join the conversation on Facebook and share your experiences!

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