Today what I want to talk about is the importance of aligning your marketing channels with your target audience.
The reason I want to talk a little bit about this is simple; as I talked to various business owners and people looking to get into marketing, there's generally this attitude of "I want to get my message out in front of as many people as possible".
This is usually followed up with some kind of comment like "the more people I can talk to the better, right?"
The truth is, that's not always the case. My experience is that unless you've got a huge budget, and products with very, very broad appeal, then you tend to get much better results by focusing your marketing where you can make the biggest impact.
One of the best ways you can do this is to really think about where your audience spends their time, how they do their research, what they're looking for, and then align your marketing to that.
Let's take a social media platform like Instagram. Instagram is great if you're doing e commerce, if you're selling to a younger demographic, if you've got something really visual, but a lot of the clients I work with are in traditional b2b Industries.
It may well be that your audiences don't spend much time on Instagram. Just because "Instagram is hot right now", it doesn't mean it is necessarily the right choice for your audience. Maybe if we're talking social media, something like LinkedIn, we've got better buyers sitting there. But even just you know, it can lead people astray and sort of neglecting really key fundamentals like saying, what sort of questions are my audience asking? And then Am I answering them with good content on my website, because hey, there's this shiny object over there, that's Instagram, or there's this shiny object over there. That's Snapchat, or this is a shiny object over there. That's Pinterest. And so I'm going to drop tools, divert my focus to those because that's what's hot right now. And then the marketing that's actually more channel relevant to your audience, that sort of falls by the wayside a little bit. Now, this is a hard thing to answer without sort of knowing what it is your business does, and how you operate and who you're selling to. But yeah, just have think about, you know, other marketing channels you're using, especially the ones online are, they really aligned to what your audience does. So if you need to talk to, you know, business owners, if you need to talk to executives, you know, if you need to talk to managers, within companies, in something like LinkedIn is obviously going to be probably a better platform for you, you know, maybe you have an audience that just doesn't really use social media much at all, or it's going to be really hard to target them on social media. But you might have a way with a time targeting them on something like Google ads or using SEO. So yeah, once again, this is one of those How long is a piece of string kind of questions, it is quite hard to know, without knowing your business what to recommend. But I guess what I'm trying to do here is just challenge you to think about, are you actually aligning your marketing message with the right channels, or I usually just putting yourself out there in as many places as possible. Because for whatever reason, you've heard that this particular platform is hot and where it's at, or, you know, it just feels right, one of the key things I find is that business owners will get themselves into marketing and places that don't necessarily make a great deal of sense. Because you know, it feels right, because that's what everyone else is doing. And sometimes you can do better just by sticking to your guns and focusing on a few key areas.
Obviously, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. So if you're trying different channels of diversifying the risk, your marketing, that's a good thing. But if you're trying them just because you're going with the crowd, and it's not really best suited to your audience, well, then that's something you need to think about as well.
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