Why digital marketing is an effective way to reach your ideal customer
Chris Botterill | March 1, 2022
In our first two blogs in this series, we covered two important digital marketing tools: search and retargeting. Both are cost-effective, powerful and essential to a balanced strategic marketing plan that directly connects you to your potential customer base.
Your target audience is composed of your ideal clients and is specific to you and your business – from the services to the products to your location as well as countless other metrics. Your audience members share certain commonalities that lead to sales and understanding this is crucial.
The objective in advertising has always been to reach the ideal customer, but the approach has changed over the decades.
From casting a wide net to hyper-targeted audience segmentation
In advertising’s Golden Age of glossy magazines, catchy jingles and the Big Yellow Book, the audiences were the public. Educated guesswork combined with stereotyping and calculated assumptions were deployed when casting a wide net.
With few major networks and radio stations and limited broadcast hours, ads generally reached the entire viewership/listenership, with only a fraction of that audience being potential customers.
With the explosion of hundreds of specialty 24/7 TV channels and then to the Internet era with streaming giants (like Netflix and Spotify), radio and TV audiences have sharply declined. Google replaced the Big Yellow Telephone Book. Advertisers had to calibrate to the digital age as suddenly the general audience was on free platforms like Facebook and Google. Data became easy to collect and store, and ultimately analyze. Patterns and behaviour became predictable, and the platform hosts capitalized on the trend, monetizing the data.
We would be remiss to not mention that some companies took data sharing too far, with creepy privacy breaches that landed CEOs in front of Supreme Court judges for selling private information to sketchy third parties.
However, what most people do not realize is how much generic anonymous data about habits and behaviour is available for businesses of any size to use. And how useful it can be.
Everything done online tells a story. Behavioural clues come from:
- devices including age, size, and brand
- desktops
- operating systems
- geographical locations
- number of average clicks on website
- websites most visited
- videos watched
- apps downloaded
- algorithms
- language
- subcultures and groups
- email sign ups…and more
Combined information based on online behaviour and activities is available for you to match to the attributes of your ideal customer, with the benefits listed here:
- Your target audience is found using unprecedented laser focus techniques.
- You are not bothering others. Your ads go to screens of engaged and responsive customers, organically interested in what you have to offer.
- You connect with your ideal client who is IN the buying cycle, in real time.
- Your results are measurable. See your ROI in data reports!
This is the third blog in a six-part series that boils down the fundamental of digital marketing. Click here to view the other blogs: