5 Steps to Start Marketing to the Correct Audience Quickly

The world of online marketing and social media changes rapidly.  Keeping up can be hard. Getting new customers in this ever-changing climate is challenging. With a little bit of structure, you can create a plan and start marketing to the correct audience quickly.

Let’s talk about five simple steps you can take to get this accomplished.

Step 1 – Settle on a niche.

The first step you need to determine is who you are going to reach out to – what is your niche? As you are picking your niche, you also need to understand your perfect customer.

As an example, let’s say you are in the travel business. You can sell travel packages to many different types of people – but one type will be the one that you can convert to paying clients quickly.

So, take a moment to determine exactly who it is that is your perfect (aka ideal) customer. For our example, let’s say you cater to primarily retired people or executives.

This becomes your niche.

Now, once you have determined your niche, consider where they “hang out” and what they generally are doing.

Step 2 – Find out where they spend their time online.

Determining where your retirees are hanging out will help you focus your marketing content. You would probably find 60-year-old retired men on LinkedIn. They are most likely reading publications like The Wall Street Journal. Retired women, say in the 50-to-60-year-old range, are probably spending time on Facebook and absorbing information from channels like HGTV or reading HGTV Magazine.

Once you have determined where they hang out, you also need to segment them into groups, such as:

• Those that like to travel vs. those that are homebodies.
• Those that have discretionary income to travel vs. those who do not.
• Those couples that want to travel together

Breaking them into groups helps you hone in on their travel needs and desires so you can take the next step.

Step 3 – Create great content for them to absorb.

Now that you know who you are targeting, you need to create great content that will draw them into your message. The content can be in a variety of forms like blog posts, videos, or podcasts.

What you want to do though is continue dialing in your content. Instead of producing general information, create content focused on a particular location, like Paris, France, and talk about the culture, how to make it through the Louvre, or whatever else you can specifically talk about. This can be done for any location – Brazil, South America, Dubai, China.

The idea is to give people precise information about where they want to go.

Once you have the content ready to go, you have to put it somewhere. Put it where you have identified they hang out at – and then get them talking.

Step 4 – Get some controlled engagement going.

As you are posting your content on Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever media your target audience is you want to funnel them into places where they can engage with you and each other. You can do this by creating Facebook or LinkedIn groups focused on traveling to Dubai or Paris or any other place you have discovered they want to visit. Once created, invite those people you have identified as travelers to join your group for sharing experiences and entertaining banter.

Step 5 – Create and foster community.

All of this engagement builds a community around your niche where people are helping each other. Your community will grow to know, like, and trust you and your company since you are trying to create fabulous traveling experiences. You are drawing them in.

There is another way you can create community, and that is to ask people to sign up for your email list. You segment each list based on the desired travel destination they want to visit. Then you drip feed little pieces, using the same specific information you have already created, via an autoresponder.

Understanding what content is.

We have been talking about creating content and finding where your target market hangs out, but it is probably time to make sure you understand what I mean by content.

Content can be things like blog posts, videos on YouTube, or podcasts. Ideally, you want your videos and podcasts to direct people back to your website.

One of my favorite things to share is to take a video you have created, turn it into a podcast, have the audio transcribed, and now you have three forms of your content. Finally, you can then send out an email that lets your list know you have new content and gives them options for consuming it in their preferred way.

Final Thoughts

Working through all these steps will only get you so far.

It's important to remember that you need to distribute your content continually. If you have people join your email list, make sure you are sending out autoresponder emails and encouraging them to comment on your Facebook group.

If you have people engaging on social media make sure you consistently post content out and draw them back to your website. This creates a closed-loop system where people participate in social media, join your email list, and then hear from you directly through email.

When you run through these steps, you are getting people to know, like, and trust you. When they do, they are no longer your prospects…they are now your converts.