This post is an excerpt from our free 30 Days 30 Ways Online Marketing program.
Target is all about getting found by your ideal audience. You can NOT be successful in online marketing without effective activities that target your audience. Target is about understanding your audience (beyond demographics), how to find them, and how best to initiate “touch points” with them — in order to engage, IMPACT, and convert them. It’s about the “reach out” — knowing when, where, and how to reach out to your audience.
Target is also about understanding who your audience really is. Most business owners believe their goal is to simply target those that will pull out their wallet and purchase. Wrong. Your audience is everyone that contributes to the sales cycle, whether others in your niche/industry, people who influence your audience, bloggers who can help you reach your audience, and other segments. Target will help you identify ALL the groups in your audience and the best way to reach them.
Why Target is Important
Without Target, you will always operate in “hit and miss” mode. You’ll follow gurus that will tell you to obtain massive visibility by simply broadcasting your stuff in as many places as possible. You’ll follow blueprints that will have you wasting a ton of time in places your audience is either non-existent or not receptive to your efforts.
You will waste time, money, and a host of other resources. Remember, there is always an opportunity cost of doing one thing over another. This cost is much more devastating for the solo-professional, one-man-show, or small business with limited resources.
Target will help you plan your activities and the strategies behind them. You’ll be able to answer the following questions and more:
- How does SEO/SMO help me get found by my ideal audience? What strategies should I use in my SEO/SMO?
- What keywords are relevant in getting found by my audience?
- Should I podcast or create videos to get found… or both?
- Should I educate, empower, entertain, or a mixture in my multimedia content marketing?
- Should I blog and how should I blog to get found by my audience?
- Where is my audience in social media and online communities?
- What social media sites should I invest time and resources in?
- What kind of content marketing should I implement and what channels should I publish to get found?
The list could go on, each list being relative to each business — but you get the point.
Target is about knowing exactly how to get found by your ideal audience, in the most efficient and consistent way.
Understanding the components of Target
In every part of the IMPACT Marketing Formula, there is strategy and tactics.
Target Strategies: The who, when, and where of reaching out to your ideal audience.
Target Tactics: The how and what of reaching out to your ideal audience.
What Target means for your business…
Awareness is visibility, your audience STARTS with awareness of you. This is ultimately the beginning of your relationship with them, at the surface level. They are aware you exist, possibly aware of why you exist, but that’s about it. You’re in front of them… Awareness does not contribute to revenues except to begin the sales cycle.
Engagement is where the magic happens — where your audience takes meaningful action at a level that is much more than just seeing and being “aware” of you. Now, don’t confuse this with interaction, the huge gray area in between awareness and engagement. Interaction is part of the “dance” that happens while you’re building a relationship with your audience that leads to engagement. Interaction is at a slightly deeper level than the surface where awareness happens, but make no mistake it is not engagement. I repeat, it is not engagement.
Important things to remember: the Target Phases are fluid and organic, there are no hard lines. It’s important to simply understand the process. Start to recognize what online activities fit into what part of your Target efforts — are you mistaking Awareness tactics for Engagement? Are you trying to sell at the wrong stage in the process? Are you skipping Interaction, simply broadcasting for Awareness then hard selling for Convert?
Engagement is much more meaningful and greatly contributes to the sales cycle (good or bad), ultimately impacting your bottom line results across the board. Engagement will allow your audience to learn more about you in a way that will contribute to their motivation to purchase from you. Meaningful engagement will also help you learn more about your audience to know how to build deeper relationships and how to motivate them to go deeper with you or purchase from you. Engagement is a beautiful thing.
What’s the Big Diff?
Huge! If all you ever do is create awareness and interaction at superficial levels that mean nothing to your audience, you will fail and fail miserably in your online marketing efforts. You also need to understand, what you do to build awareness, might not (and often will not) be the same you as what you do for interaction or engagement. Each is unique but very important to the process.
Remember…
Step 1: Target to get found by your ideal audience.
Step 2: Awareness, the art of being found, being known, being visible.
Step 3: Interaction, the art of getting involved in the conversation and getting surface level responses.
Step 4: Engagement, the art of building meaningful relationships that benefit your audience and your company, that go far beyond look at me and my stuff.
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