Seth Godin once said: Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers. Are you interested in learning how to create a social media campaign? Looking for the latest social media marketing tactics? It is not terribly hard to accomplish these objectives.
We’ll share with you how the most successful businesses use social media to grow business and brand loyalty. This is a four-part series, with this article being part 2, target customer.
Here are the links to the other Social Media Campaign Secrets series articles:
Part 1 The Big Picture
Part 3 Listening and Engaging
Part 4 Telling Stories
And it is essential to know who those customers are, isn’t it? Businesses that put a priority on understanding their customers and improving consumer targeting definitely know most of them. And they are trying to figure out the questions behind each customer segment. What motivates them, and what drives their attitudes and behaviors. In this blog, we will share some tips on how to target customers.
Creating a social media campaign starts with knowing and understanding your target customers and being able to segment them into groups. Without this customer segmentation, you really don’t know your customers’ thoughts.
It is obvious your customers are not all alike. However, knowing how they are segmented will help you target and understand them more easily.
Then you will be able to apply more relevant messages to each segment. The more relevant and focused your messages, the more effective your social media campaign … it is that simple.
Customer market segmentation analysis permits a business to better target its customers. Targeting is growing in importance as more and more customer engagement is focused on relevance and relationship building.
Targeting permits better focus on relevance and relationship building to improve customer engagement. There are many ways to define your market as segments, such as behavioral, psychographic, demographic, and geographic.
There are many ways to expand your thinking on customer segments.
Take a look at these:
Five special types of customer segments that can be very useful in engaging customers:
These customers seek a sense of community and/or experience. They are driven by a specific experience and a specific customer community.
Discount
Customers who shop at the same stores frequently, make decisions based on ‘deals’. A good example of this target segment is JC Penny’s which quickly left when the store recently changed its sales strategy.
Target customer … Loyal
Customers who shop with you on a regular basis. No longer 80/20 … they do represent 20% of customers, but no more than 50% of sales. Clearly, there is a trend away from customer loyalty, as the competition grows.
Impulse
No specific shopping goal, they shop on a whim and buy what seems good at the time.
Mission
Have a specific intention/goal for specific items.
Can you spot these customer types in your store?
Do you know your best customers and their shopping patterns and practices?
And then design your customer experiences and marketing to these patterns and practices?
The thesis of his article is: customer market segmentation is at the heart of marketing practice, yet it simply does not work that well because it is rarely very actionable. His article describes how that can change using these four approaches to customer segmentation.
Let’s examine his four approaches:
Segment moments
We are much more interested in Ford or General Motors when we are looking to buy a car than right after we make the purchase, correct?
When we are dieting makes us much more interesting in Atkins, Dukan, and Weight Watchers than when are not dieting. In this age of digital and social commerce, moments become directly targetable because our current goals give out great forensic signs as we travel the internet world. We seek out different content, search for different terms, like different things on Facebook, and different products show up on our frequent shopper data.
This includes all highly targetable customers without needing to water things down with demographics, which is a good thing.
Increasingly, we can merge digital and social data with frequent shopper data for ad targeting. So what, you may ask? It is simply that a marketer can now target their advertising to ’switchable’.
Who are they? They are consumers who buy your brand occasionally but not most of the time. Why is this significant?
It is simple
We receive a much higher response to advertising and promotions from switchable than from those who are completely loyal to either you or some competitive brand.
Segment shopper types
Plan purchases or decide in-store? Explore to find new meal ideas? Like to sample new products? Can we assume you have an infant at home given diaper and formula purchases? All of these have clear action implications for product placement, store layouts, and specific shopper promotions delivered in customized ways.
You may be wondering …
This is increasingly accomplished via mobile apps.
Segment targetable interests and values
Rather than creating a battery of questions for segmentation and HOPE that we can target segments, why not flip this around? Why not analyze the interests, cultural values, and lifestyle characteristics that are available via Facebook or Google profiles and create segments on factors that reflect those actionable characteristics?
That way, you can take your segmentation and be much more proactive. Furthermore, every ad campaign becomes a test of the specific targets because they should exhibit a greater response.
What do you think? Convinced enough to give these approaches a try? We certainly are.
Our takeaways
It is critical for businesses to segment their customers by several means. Learn about and talk through generational issues so as to assist in building customer relationships.
In engaging customers, acknowledge and appreciate differences. In moving forward, continue to develop your knowledge of each generation’s preferences.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Successful Social Media Marketing Tactics You Should Employ
Social Media Marketing Lessons From the New Pros in Town
The secret to the iphone5 TV ads …Effective Apple Marketing Strategy?
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time. A great quote from Henry Ford. Yes, your best competitors are making their business better and better all the while. And their growth is all about their marketing strategy. Of course, if you pay attention to competitors, you know this. That is what Google would tell you if they were marketing your company. They would also tell you to pay attention and to be different for each customer.
And pay particular attention to your best and long-term customers.
Michael Schrage writes about a large bank that discovered that 10 percent of their customers were using their online banking service every day, while the remainder were using it about once a month.
If the bank brought in a consultant to evaluate this, his first conclusion would be for the bank to stop spending so much on the service for so few people.
It was, after all, appealing to only the innovators and the early adopters. After a little analysis, however, the consultant would show this small group also accounted for about 70 percent of the bank’s deposits.
The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.
Know your customer segments.
It is often easy to look at an idea distribution curve and tell that the most profitable place to be is right in the center, where all the customers are.
However, that doesn’t reflect reality most of the time. Often, the valuable sections of customers are located to one side or the other.
What this bank realized is that by focusing on this small slice of innovative customers, the bank may be able to attract even more highly profitable, risk-seeking customers. And leave the much less attractive customers to seek out competitor banks.
Here is another example where simple business processes overwhelm and, often, totally lose customers by creating terrible experiences for them. This is an actual letter sent to a bank by an 86-year old woman. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in the New York Times. Sound familiar?
I am writing to thank you for bouncing my check with which I endeavored to pay my plumber last month.
By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his presenting the check and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honor it
I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my entire pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only eight years.
You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account $30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.
Related post: An Actionable Approach to Target Market Segmentation
My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways.
What would you do, as bank President, after receiving this letter? Would your actions include looking closely at some of your ‘simple’ business processes?
The bottom line
That’s the thing, customers are never all the same. Neither should be your business practice applications to those customers.
Differentiate your customers. Find and know the group that is most profitable for your business. Find out who your long time customers are. They are the ones most likely to be your advocates. Find the group that is most likely to be moving into this most profitable group.
Figure out how to capture the hearts of these groups and focus less on the rest. Review your best practices and see if you could simplify some to make them better and more convenient for these groups.
Don’t let your best practices and/or your marketing cater to the masses. Cater to those customers that will make the difference to the real success of the business.
Remember this above all else. Don’t just keep up with your competitors. Always strive to leapfrog.
Not just best practices but next practices.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative, social marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
Check out these additional articles on business lessons from our library:
