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Marketing & lead generation
How to Grow Your Target Audience
8 min read
A core part of marketing success involves reaching more audiences. Year after year, to generate demand, companies must increase the number of people interested in and actively engaged with their brand.
Whether it’s focusing on audience preferences or engaging more powerfully with them on social, B2B companies must explore ways to switch up their marketing to increase brand reach, drive sales, and remain relevant in their industry.
The process involves identifying & targeting new audience groups with the help of a CRM software like efficy’s. It’s a crucial touchpoint in B2B growth, as it's important to have an ever-increasing list of businesses to contact, including information about their interactions with your business.
But reaching new audiences requires a mix of strategies and marketing channels, since over 85% of customers demand a balance of both non-digital and digital experiences with brands. Customers are more likely to increase their average spend on a brand leveraging these channels with a more personalised approach to their messaging.
In this post, we explore digital and non-digital tactics to help you expand your marketing footprint — and your audience:
What is a target audience?
A target audience for a B2B (business-to-business) company is a specific group of businesses or organisations to which the company aims to sell their products or services.
This group is chosen based on factors such as:
- The company's offerings,
- The needs and pain points of the group, and;
- The group's ability to benefit from and afford the company's offerings.
Let’s say your B2B company sells enterprise software. You’re most likely targeting large corporations in a specific industry, such as finance or healthcare.
Your target audience may have a specific need for the software, such as compliance with industry regulations or the ability to handle large amounts of data, and they certainly have the resources and budget to purchase and implement the software.
B2B companies must clearly define and understand their target audience (using market research and analysis, customer interviews, and surveys) to effectively market their offerings.
Why is audience growth important?
A stagnant audience forces B2B companies to depend on a single market or customer group, leaving them super-vulnerable to changes in customer behaviour or market fluctuations. It also limits their marketing potential, affecting their bottom line, which ripples through other ambitions to invest in product development.
As such, growing your audience is important for several reasons:
- Increased revenue: A larger audience means more potential customers and increased sales, which can lead to higher revenue for the company.
- Brand awareness: A larger target market can help increase brand awareness and reach for a company, which can lead to more customer engagement and, ultimately, more sales.
- Cost-effective marketing: A larger public can help a company spread the cost of marketing and advertising over a larger group, making marketing efforts more cost-effective.
- Insights: A larger target audience can provide a company with more insights into the needs and pain points of their customers, which can help the company improve their products and services.
- New opportunities: A larger audience can open up new opportunities for a company, such as new partnerships and collaborations, as well as the ability to enter new markets and industries.
- Diversification: Having a larger target market can also provide diversification for a company, making it less dependent on a single market or customer group.
Marketing strategies that enable target audience growth.
Begin with already-existing data
A core benefit of data analytics is that you can always start from what you know. If your target audience shares preferences or certain traits with a similar set of businesses, then those businesses are a good place to start when looking to grow your audience.
But first, this requires a closer look at what you know about your current audience. Do they come from a similar location? Do they share similar pain points and buying behaviours? Are they likely to respond positively (or engage with)your marketing message? Are they also capable of purchasing your product?
You can use already-existing data about your audience to find similar businesses, using these questions to qualify them. While most businesses see their campaigns gather helpful data about their audience, organising and interpreting such data in light of growth objectives, and from a growth perspective can mean sorting through a clutter of spreadsheets.
This is where efficy’s CRM shines through — our dashboard is filled with insights on already-existing audiences, with a focus on potential new audiences you should be engaging with (based on the available data.)
Given the available data, you can then deploy a segmentation tool to target these potential new audience sets based on their behaviour, create even new audience segments (with the ability to scale them as you grow) and further benefit from the predictive capabilities and marketing analytics of efficy.
For instance, a branding agency can identify and target new startup audiences that may have signalled interest in branding services (whether by signing up for newsletters or engaging with a piece of content) and segment them by interest.
Go Omnichannel
After noting which markets you wish to explore, your marketing must be cohesive across platforms. This means the same marketing materials and customer experiences across multiple channels, helping you amplify your message better and spend less on creatives.
According to a 2020 study, marketing campaigns using three or more channels (for instance, social media, email, paid search, and content marketing) have a 90% higher retention rate than campaigns using single channels.
With customer preferences constantly evolving, you want to keep track of this when expanding your target audience. Monitor their social media activity, buying behaviour, engagement habits, preferences, and other insights. Then, leverage this data when planning new outreach or refreshing an existing one.
To demonstrate (omnichannel marketing), if you’re a B2B firm that sells industrial equipment, you’ll need a mix of content marketing, email campaigns, trade show events, and social media advertising to grow your audience.
You may share valuable content with CTAs to fill up their contact form or newsletters. Using efficy’s campaign automation, you can set automation triggers to send targeted promotional emails to these audiences. You can also attend trade shows to meet with them in person as you showcase your products and use social media to build brand awareness and thought leadership in your industry.
By using multiple channels, the company can reach a wider audience and effectively communicate the value of their products and services.
Boost your landing page traffic
It may sound cliche, but there’s no increase in your target audience without an increase in traffic. Traffic from targeted ads, social posts, and other content leading to your landing page can present a fresh pipeline of audiences to target.
To achieve this, you need compelling CTAs that align with businesses’ needs and preferences in your marketing. You also need on-page content for people looking to learn more about your offerings. For instance, a paid ad can lead your prospective audience to a landing page promoting one of your services with a newsletter sign-up form or a link to marketing collateral (think an industry whitepaper or blog).
Supplementing your landing page with such avenues for engagement will help you make the most of your efforts to get them there.
efficy’s Audience feature gives a comprehensive view of your public you can group based on location, industry, or even sign-up source. For instance, you may find that most of your engaged audiences come from your landing page. In such a case, this is a cue to focus on that channel. You may also find that your target market responds better to a CTA inviting them for a free consultation rather than a discount.
With an analytic dashboard showing you patterns that provide insight, you can tap into new opportunities for more personalised messaging to win new audiences over!
Explore strategic partnerships
Chances are that your offerings are complementary to that of another organisation, i.e. you have a similar target audience but offer a different product or service. Since they’re not competitors, would it not be sound to explore a team up with complementary businesses to grow your audience by forming partnerships or collaborations?
This can range from cross-promotion on each other's platforms to co-hosting events or webinars and creating joint products or services. Complementary markets help you avoid having to start from scratch when looking to boost visibility — offline and online.
This way, you can both benefit from the partnership by reaching new customers who are interested in what the other business has to offer. Additionally, networking and building relationships with complementary businesses in your industry can also help to expand your reach and grow your audience.
Attract & engage audiences on social
Taking a close look at your social media channels can reveal opportunities to strike new relationships and broaden your audience, whether that’s through social listening, allowing brands to gauge customer perception through targeted surveys, or actively connecting with audiences on social media.
In B2B, 65% of companies utilise LinkedIn paid ads to acquire new customers. On the organic front, sharing expertise through a content strategy that adds value or piques the interests of other businesses can help you hit it off with new audiences.
For instance, if you offer digital signing solutions, you can post about the difference between digital signing and electronic signing. Once businesses — looking to sign documents using a seamless, legally valid solution — start viewing and sharing these posts, you can repost these on your social media channels to involve your audience with your brand.
Accelerate your target audience growth with efficy.
Who wants to see a good thing end? Not us, and certainly not you! Well, the good news is: it doesn’t have to — as long as you can grow it.
And when it comes to growing your audience, it’s an ever-evolving process that involves adapting your marketing strategy to the available market data to build a strong online presence that attracts B2B audiences.
efficy CRM has the features to help you gather a wealth of data you need to put fresh insights to work towards sustaining a steady stream of audiences. Prefer to see our audience growth enablers in action for yourself? Click here to book a demo.
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