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2 minute read
Once the hard yards of research, segmentation, targeting and positioning have all been completed, you may think that you can leave the target audience element of your marketing strategy alone.
Think again!
A market condition adjusts. Technology advances.
And your target audience behaviours adapt alongside it.
The way they interact with your brand, their expectations of your service or technology shifts, and suddenly the comms strategy you’d developed isn’t landing as hard.
Keeping ahead of your customers’ and prospective customers’ needs, wants, motivations and behaviours will help your marketing plan stay relevant and on point in the face of the ever-changing world we live in.
So here are some areas you should periodically observe to keep in-tune.
- New Technology
- The economy
- Competitors
- Legislation
- Climate
- Health
AI has forced the copy-writing and design industries to pivot.
Automation software has helped companies deliver intuitive journeys to their customers across multiple platforms.
Interest rate hikes have increased the cost of living impacting households’ discretionary spending budgets.
Climate changes have forced insurance companies to adapt their policy structures.
The health movement is leading to a decline in overall alcohol sales, and a move towards health-related education and products.
Think about which of the above, or other factors impact your brand.
Keep an eye on your competitors to see how they’re adapting (or not). Are they moving faster than you? Are they developing new, or adapting products and services?
To get the most accurate read of your target audience and how these factors are changing their attitudes or behaviours, consider surveying them at least annually. This will give you trends over time that you can lean into, including how they perceive your competitors versus your brand in the context of these factors.
You can also glean insights from:
- Existing customers (why are they using you vs competitors, what would they like to see?)
- Churned customers (why did they leave, where did they go, why?)
- Unconverted leads (why didn’t they proceed?)
- Research studies (insights on a studied topic)
- A/B or Multivariate testing (which messages or CTAs resonate most)
- Follow social groups, companies, news portals (to stay up to date with movements)
Staying up to date with the market movements is a great start, but many companies make an albeit educated guess on what their customer needs as a result, without doing the research.
If that guess is slightly off, then time and money will be invested in a whim that doesn’t pay off.
By that time a new trend will be emerging, but the company is now down on its target and putting pressure on the marketing team to run short-term activations to spike sales, instead of keeping true to its strategy to hit its objectives while leaning into market evolutions.
Sound familiar?
Yep. Here’s a cheat sheet for you to follow to avoid this scenario:
- Identify the macro factors that are most likely to impact your brand and/or product.
- Start a periodical survey for prospects, customers, churned customers and unconverted leads, asking them how these factors have impacted them.
- Keep a close eye on relevant sources of information to stay on the pulse of changes as they happen.
- Build some hypotheses of how your brand should adapt to stay relevant to your audience, using the insights from the surveys.
- Test these hypotheses in your channels, to see which messages resonate and prove or disprove your hypotheses.
- Implement and track, optimise and continue to adapt.
