Understanding Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience will help you understand which marketing funnels to target and how to analyze the data you receive. Your target audience will dictate the type of content you produce and which channels or social media platforms you are putting the most capital into promoting.

Any successful marketing campaign will know a target market's demographic trends, interests, dislikes, and popular social media platforms. It is important to know the social media of choice for each demographic to streamline your social media marketing efforts.

Luckily, case studies are available outlining a target audience's eccentricities, and great digital marketers study popular content that gets engagement from their target audience to see which posts get the most engagement.

If you are trying to target Generation Z, for instance, you should see more clicks and engagement on TikTok versus a Facebook page. Moreover, your content should be geared more toward that audience.

At the moment, Gen Z is interested in low-rise jeans, middle parts, LGBTQ culture, ...(etc.) All of this data is useful for aligning your content to speak to your target audience. As Gen Z would put it, your target audience should "feel seen."

Collecting Data

Once you know your business goals and target market, you can collect and analyze data. Web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, are great ways to gather important demographic data of your web traffic to see if you are reaching your conversion goals as well as attracting your target market.

Collecting data, adjusting your ad spend, and tweaking your overall marketing strategy is key to optimizing your marketing.

Once you gather marketing data, organize it and look at the conversion rates of each point of the sales funnel to ensure that there are no bottlenecks. The most important metric to look for are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Popular KPIs include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs
  SEO KPIs are metrics that inform you of a website's position on a search engine results page and include things like page rank, ranked keywords, and domain strength.
• Social Media KPIs
  Social media KPIs are the number of likes, shares, retweets, or other engagements that a post receives from different demographics.
• Google Analytics & Website Health Scores
  Google Analytics helps businesses find bugs in their code to improve technical SEO as well as give the demographic data of web page visitors and volume of site traffic.
• Email marketing KPIs
  When sending a marketing email, it is important to measure the open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate. A healthy list should get at least a 10% open rate, but anything north of 20% is favorable to a profitable email marketing strategy.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  When paying for advertising, it is important to measure how long people look at an advertisement and what is the click rate and conversion rate.
• Cookies
  By analyzing third-party data, you can determine what your target audience is most likely to click on or what their behavior is at a particular time of day. This data informs digital marketers when to release ad campaigns.

These metrics are an important puzzle piece in the picture of the consumer's sales journey. However, they do not indicate what the users did following the engagement. Did they purchase the product? Did they share it with a friend? Are they still interested? After gathering key metrics, marketers focus on marketing performance optimization.

Marketing Performance Optimization

Marketing optimization is a process by which ad spending is tweaked to find the amount that generates the most net revenue. For instance, a company that spends $200/week on Google AdWords could find that they achieve the same number of sales if they cut their spending to $160.

In this instance, the company would increase net revenue by $40 and have a more efficient marketing strategy.

This is called "performance marketing." Performance marketing is becoming increasingly popular because it requires less upfront investment into ad campaigns without jeopardizing results. Sometimes, however, increased paid advertisements result in more profit for a company.

In some instances, marketing optimization requires more money spent on ads. For example, a company could be spending $200 on ads. One week they increase their spending to $300. After increasing their ad spend, their sales jump $300 more than the week prior. As a result, their net profit increased by $200.

How to Start Optimizing Marketing Campaigns

After your business outlines its yearly goals and studies its target audience, you can begin optimizing your marketing campaign. Optimizing your marketing campaign requires you to collect data from multiple marketing channels such as social media platforms, outreach emails, SERP, and location-based targeting.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can help a business with brand building and awareness. Most importantly, discover which social media platforms are appropriate for your business. If you want to portray a professional image, stick to sites such as LinkedIn or Twitter.

However, if you have a younger target demographic, increase your presence on apps like TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat.

Boost SEO Performance

25% of people click the first result on a Google search. Therefore, improving your website's position on a SERP is crucial to gaining more organic traffic and increasing sales. Methods to boost SEO performance include studying and targeting keywords, improving technical SEO, and link baiting.

Email Marketing

Outreach emails are extremely effective tools. Moreover, they are also cheap and do not require money to send. Moreover, most people check their email 15 times per day.

A study conducted by Litmus, email marketing industry leader, revealed that entrepreneurs get “a whopping $36 for every $1 spent” on their email marketing. One easy way to increase sales from your email campaigns is by incorporating Deadline Funnel into your live launches and evergreen promos alike.

Additionally, when you collect information for your mailing list, you can ask for key demographic data such as age and sex. After collecting the data, you can send emails that align with their particular demographic.

Location-Based Targeting

Location-based targeting includes creating ads that are specific to a person's city or state. For example, in the early 2000s Ford Trucks released an ad campaign specific for Texas residents, which stated, "Ford is the Best in Texas."

This campaign perfectly demonstrates location-based targeting because it would be inappropriate to release in a Maine province.

Personalized Marketing Campaign Optimization

Personalized marketing campaign optimization allows you to tailor your spending to achieve the most revenue from your target markets.

By using analytics tools, you have the power to reach new potential customers and increase your overall revenue without increasing your ad spending. Perhaps you may even be able to decrease your spending toward paid advertising.

Marketing optimization is still a new process that allows smaller companies to compete alongside larger firms through the use of highly targeted and sophisticated campaigns. To take advantage of marketing optimization, it is essential to define your company goals and analyze key metrics.

Once you optimize your marketing, your business has the potential to reach new heights regardless of its size. Do not waste valuable time and optimize your marketing today.