Targeted Marketing: Find and Capture Your Ideal Customer

Targeted marketing segments and personas are often developed from different, complementary perspectives and are sometimes used interchangeably. But there is a distinct difference: Segmentation brings structure and logic to your targeted marketing — while buyer personas bring an empathetic dimension to customers’ needs and expectations. By setting your targets where customer and commercial needs intersect, you can generate more powerful segments and integrate the pre- and post-acquisition journeys more effectively. 

CMOs acknowledge that customer understanding remains a top three capability gap and that finding better ways of integrating and drawing insights from their data is a critical need. While there are a number of ways that organizations group their customers, the end goal is the same: to identify patterns that enable your brand to target and build relationships with the right customers.

Recognizing not just why your ideal customers engage and buy, but also what they do and think, can help build stronger, more lasting relationships. Your targeted marketing strategy should weigh toward gleaning needs-based insights from your existing customer base to reveal how and why customers make decisions.

Focus on the “differences that make a difference” 

When looking for patterns and themes within your customer base, the most natural places to explore are drivers of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Also consider exploring the touchpoints along the journey where customers make decisions. For example, look for themes around what customers need help with, customers’ mindsets around making a decision or external stressors in their environment. 

Once you have these insights, partner with teams that own VoC, customer research and insights, and marketing analytics to create groups of customers based on the value your brand can deliver to their unique set of needs.

Creating personas and journey maps for a target audience takes time and expertise, which is why many marketers turn to agencies and consultants for help. Whether you build these assets in-house or seek the help of outside vendors, it’s critical that you start with your company’s existing data. 

These four steps can help you develop more powerful personas and journey maps with existing customer data:

• Step 1: Define your archetypes and personas. To optimize your targeted marketing campaigns, cluster customers into archetypes with similar expectations and requirements. By identifying audiences with common needs and expectations, you can develop personas that drive better adoption, and align your targeted marketing strategies to specific customers.

• Step 2: Build data-informed personas and journey maps. Once you identify your archetypes, merge the personification of a persona (the imaginary “person” who best conveys the persona) with hard data from the archetype. By bringing the qualitative and quantitative data together, personas become the basis for identifying the customer journeys that each persona needs and wants. 

• Step 3: Act on your journey maps. Mapping different customer journeys for different personas helps you to identify the standards that each persona may have for each touchpoint and uncover unique needs or gaps. Use your data archetypes of existing customers where possible, but also develop targeted marketing strategies for customers who remain anonymous — for example, by tracking website activity following a search term entry.

• Step 4: Measure your CX performance. Collect and analyze marketing and CX performance data by customer persona to evaluate and improve your CX performance within each persona group. This feedback loop of directing actions to individual customers and evaluating success creates the means for constantly improving personas and actions.

Deep consumer knowledge is critical for effective marketing strategy, execution and optimization. But truly knowing the consumer landscape and cultural context is complex, because both are rapidly changing. 

The most successful organizations track not only what’s happening to their customers and across their competitors, but also what’s happening in the cultural context of the organization. They examine the impact these events may have on the business. They decipher which emerging trends matter and why key consumer segments do what they do. And they understand how different consumers use digital tools to engage with brands and determine what to do as a result. 

To build a holistic understanding of how your target audience may evolve, focus on these three areas:

Consumer channels and platforms

A new set of consumer behavior norms is emerging across a growing number of digital channels and buying platforms. This presents a massive marketing opportunity. Customers’ relationships with smart technology and social media are inevitably tied to changes in communication and purchasing preferences across key sectors.

Successful marketing teams ask themselves:

• How is the consumer embracing rapidly evolving communication channels that create new behavioral norms and marketing opportunities?

• How is emergent consumer buying platform behavior rerouting traditional paths to purchase?

• How is the use of consumer technology changing communication and purchasing preferences in my sector?

Cultural and societal shifts

A turbulent, often-divisive social environment can quickly reshape consumers’ brand perceptions and relationship expectations. Pay attention to cultural and societal shifts in the context of external factors such as the economy, technology and politics, and their impact on consumer behavior in key sectors.

Successful marketing teams ask themselves:

• How are millennial, Gen Z and multicultural consumers’ distinctive values and behaviors leading the way in remaking the marketing landscape?

• How do life stages and aging change my target consumers’ values and behavior?

• How are demographic changes in the U.S. impacting purchasing priorities and reshaping consumer expectations in my sector?