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Understand, Communicate, Adapt
In today’s digital-driven world, most of the known and existing businesses are online. Going virtual changed a lot in the way brands communicate with their customers. Today, the quality and presentation of a product or service being offered by a brand is as important as the product or service itself. One of the main factors that contribute to the success of the online presence of any company is easy online navigation.
Now you can spend a hefty marketing budget promoting your brand across online channels, or hire a team to spread the word about your world-class service, but you don’t succeed online till you are able to get the attention of your target audience.
Usually, the marketing strategies are designed to target a specific group of people who might be interested in your product. Generally, factors like age, gender, localisation, and common interests are taken into account to make this selection. This works the same with online businesses. In order to increase traffic to a website and accelerate sales, brands must start by choosing a target audience with specified behavioural and demographic attributes as per the product or service being offered.
With a lot of digital tools available, the teams in marketing and communications make use of algorithmic databases to analyze potential target audiences. For example, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are generally user-oriented databases that help understand how customers reach certain online websites and what actions they take on their arrival. Similarly, Facebook Insights and Ad Manager allow brands to identify the age, location, behaviours, and interests of customers and website visitors.
However, it is not as simple as it sounds. These algorithmic databases do work wonders for brands, but it is important to master the art of analysing the data and website traffic in order to reach a reasonable conclusion in terms of their target audience.
One audience are selected the next step is to reach out to them with personalised messaging. this can be done through simple-to-use social media listening tools or manual monitoring of social media posts and conversations.
Finally, in order to reach your audience effectively, you must be able to retarget customers through digital tools like display ads to bring them back to the website.
Effectively maintaining a faithful audience is pivotal to increasing website traffic, sales, and the overall integrity of a brand. Therefore, it is one of the most important skills to master in terms of digital marketing.
So, now that we know how to master skills to target the right audience we will move to how to manage problems when connecting with your target audience.
Learning to Manage Problems: Target Audience
It is no secret that modern marketing has developed into a more complicated and competitive field than before, thereby increasing the sophistication of consumers and businesses and the issue of catering to the wrong audience.
One of the important concerns that brands face difficulty with is connecting with the audience. Communications firms for example resort to talking more than listening. In other words, the communication is one-sided and does not reflect the consumers’ wants.
Moreover, traditional communications subfield like advertising uses methods that focus on selling the product, an approach that has proved to be ineffective in this day and age. Preferably, consumers are more likely to indulge in a product or invest in a brand if it has been refined to suit their needs.
Creating an original product that complements your target audiences’ specific behavioral and demographic attributes can be a daunting task. However, if you simply communicate and maintain direct contact with clients and customers you get effective results.
It is possible to stimulate client and customer feedback by the following means:
Following these steps will ensure that you acquire feedback; whether it is negative or positive. This will help in rethinking or reevaluating your brand, product, or in some cases just the approach. As I learned from my experience, being oblivious to your target audience and failure to adapt to their wants and needs will lead to failure.
Mariam Elsanousi is an Account Executive at Cicero & Bernay Public Relations, an independent PR agency headquartered in Dubai offering new-age public relations consultancy to the UAE and across the MENA region. | www.cbpr.me