How do you know who you are marketing to?
You’ve done the customer surveys, read the online profiles, and spent hours curating content for your audience to download all so that you can build a profile of the perfect customer.
So how are you breaking this information down? We’ll bet it’s by age, or perhaps by gender, maybe both. But why can’t a 46-year-old female be interested in why the Huawei P20 has a better camera than the iPhone X?
That’s a classic b2c example and most of us typically assume it’s easier to market to consumers than to other businesses. After all, isn’t it only men over 50 who make the buying decisions when an enterprise decides to replace its cloud infrastructure?
Clearly the answer is no, but what’s the point? The point is that too often businesses focus their marketing efforts on demographics and binary characteristics like gender rather than focusing on personas or what makes people tick.
At Liberty, we like to advise our clients to think differently and not abide by this traditional maxim. When planning our marketing efforts alongside clients, we want to know who their customers really are. This means knowing what fills their heads, what they care about and how that translates to their activity both online and offline.
With this information, we are seeing forward thinking clients blaze a trail away from traditional demographic and geographic segmentation marketing. Instead, the innovators are exploring the value of psychographic and behavioural segmentation, and how this impacts marketing strategy.
Many may be thinking of the controversies surrounding Cambridge Analytica when reading this. In reality, what we are talking about is much simpler than that. By using publicly available customer behavioural data, as well as surveys and a bit of good old-fashioned desk research, marketing and communications strategies can better link their output to the neurons that help customers make that buying decision.
This is not a new marketing theory. It’s been around for years, but there are still marketing teams in b2b and b2c organisations that still have not got the hang of it. We’re able to help. Get in touch for a chat or some advice.
