We give a lot of consideration to connecting and engaging with your audience. Those are important steps in the Sales Lifecycle, and considered by many marketers to be the most difficult. However, if you aren’t correctly identifying and targeting your audience, you are limiting the effectiveness of your marketing.
If one phase of your Sales Lifecycle is broken, then your entire Lifecycle is effectively neutralized. Everything has to be working in conjunction for you to build successful marketing campaigns.
If your audience isn’t converting into enough leads (or converting into too many unqualified leads), then your problem may be at the top of your sales funnel.
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Identify Your Audience
Obviously you have something that you want to sell to someone. You may be an OEM, aftermarket manufacturer, dealership, or any other of a number of service providers within your industry, but you have something that you believe is valuable to the right audience.
But you need to identify who they are before you can ever go to market. So who is your audience?
First of all, you need to identify exactly who will want to buy your product and why. For your particular industry that may be a very specific niche audience, such as owner-operators, landscapers, fleet owners, heavy construction contractors, and etc. Or you may be marketing to a number of different audience segments within your industry.
If you are marketing to more than one audience segment, you might invest time in building a buyer persona to help you keep track of the different audiences you market to. It can also help you organize your content and messaging and discover potential product solutions.
Identifying your audience is key to determining your marketing strategy and messaging.
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Refine Your Audience
It’s not enough for you to just roughly identify your audience and begin planning your marketing campaign. You need to delve deeper into who your audience is. This will allow you to address specific pain points, which may not have been noticeable before you further refined your target audience.
To find out more specific information about your audience you can use data platforms to identify specific marketing opportunities. Data platforms, such as EDA (for the construction industry) and RigDig Business Intelligence (for the trucking industry), can help you refine your target audience. It can also help you identify specific opportunities such as market share, brand preference, and credit liabilities.
Even as you begin marketing, you need to continue refining your audience and discovering further information from your metrics and analytics programs.
Filling your sales funnel is an important part of the Sales Lifecycle, but it’s often overlooked when compared to later phases. However, if you are filling the top of your sales funnel correctly, you are are well on your way to accomplishing your marketing win.
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