Narrow in on Your Target Market and Stop Marketing to the Masses
Defining your target market
Marketers know that the best way to increase their bottom line is by targeting their marketing efforts to individuals who will actually buy their products and services. However, if marketing execution is driven by measuring data at the aggregate level instead of the customer level, companies may be marketing to the masses instead of their target market.
For many organizations, being able to measure at the consumer level instead of the aggregate level is just too cumbersome and time consuming. However, the benefits of measuring at the consumer level may far outweigh the difficulty. Aggregate data provides marketers with some good information and guidance for marketing strategy, but it does not paint the entire picture. And when marketers are ready to start developing their marketing strategies, they will need the information only available to them at the customer level. Marketers need specific details on consumer behaviors, lifestyles and demographics, purchase patterns, purchase channels, etc. before they will be able to build customer relationships and ultimately increase their bottom line.
Organizations that look at their customers from an aggregate level may distort their target market. For example, a company may determine that their customers are between the ages of 35 and 55 with a household income of $50k to $100k. However, when those customers are viewed at the customer level, there are actually two sets of consumers in the original customer grouping that make up the actual target market. In reality, the company’s customers are between the ages of 50 and 55 with a household income greater than $90k and between the ages of 30 to 35 with an income between $40k and $70k. Without the customer level insight, marketers would be wasting valuable marketing dollars on consumers who do not fall into their target market and could even miss a portion of their true consumers.
The benefits of measuring consumers at the customer level
Knowing what your consumers want and expect gives marketers the edge they need to accomplish true data-driven, target marketing and focus their marketing efforts on individuals who are likely to buy their products or services. The following is a list of a few benefits marketers may realize by basing their marketing campaign efforts off of customer level data.
- Discover potential niche markets
- Develop accurate customer insight
- Increase customer conversion
- Promote customer satisfaction
- Improve customer engagement
- Develop brand loyalty
- Boost customer retention
Customer level data not only tells marketers who their consumers are, but what they want and expect. Now marketers have the ability to fulfil the needs of their consumers and build strong customer relationships with messages and offers tailored to specifically meet and exceed their expectations—making your customers feel like an important part of your organization. In addition, when customers know your messages are of interest to them and are not a waste of their time, they are more likely to pay attention to your messages and take positive action.
A marketing database allows access to customer level data
Most companies collect a variety of data from their customers and prospects through their call center, web site, retail stores, surveys, promotions, etc. However, for many companies it is not the lack of data, but the ability to fully integrate all of the different marketing data they have to paint the most complete picture for each consumer and prospect. The first step to measuring your marketing data at the customer level is integrating ALL of your marketing data. While having a lot of great data is a good thing, all of that data is sometimes difficult to manage and maintain. There are a lot of options for building a marketing database. Marketers can choose from software that allows internal staff to manage and maintain marketing data to home grown database solutions to a fully outsourced and hosted marketing database solution. The right solution depends on the goals of the marketing team. In addition, to ensure the marketing database solution will continue to meet your needs today and into the future, you will need to routinely and easily update the data on a regular basis to add and modify the information for each record as well as to add additional individuals to the marketing database.
Maintenance of your marketing database is the key to learning even more about your consumers and prospects. The changing customer level data allows marketers to see data fluctuations and identify the possible causes for the variations in the data. Identifying the changes in your marketing data will help you successfully develop marketing strategies to address marketing goals such as, retention, win back, brand loyalty and marketing churn as well as identify which marketing campaigns are working and which are not—saving you valuable marketing dollars.
Once you have all of your data in one location and routine maintenance in place, you can begin to evaluate your data on a regular basis by creating high level reports or marketing data snapshots that will highlight trends and provide a historical overview of where your customers are in their purchase journey. Then, over time you can create additional snapshots to compare against past snapshots. Now you will begin to see differences in your consumers as they progress in their purchase journey and you will be able to build marketing strategies that will be based on facts and knowledge and will allow your organization to build stronger consumer relationships.
Get the most from your marketing dollars by examining your consumers at the customer level instead of the aggregate level and start developing marketing strategies and campaigns that will increase your bottom line.
Dovetail provides marketers with a marketing database solution that fully-integrates marketing data from across an organization into a scalable solution that will grow with your company. In addition, Dovetail performs routine updates and maintenance to ensure your data is always fresh and actionable, provides a variety of reporting and analyses options and leverages pristine, integrated data into other marketing and sales platforms.
Filed under: Database Marketing