Are You Reaching the Right People?

“If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.” –- Jim Stengel

Stengel put it much more eloquently than we could (we tried – it got weird). Targeting the right audience makes your marketing and business efforts much more effective than if you were to try to sell to everyone. Sure, the zoo is a great place to safely see a lion, but is that an accurate depiction? Will you be able to go home as a lion expert now? No, of course not. Because you didn’t spend the right time and effort to actually learn about how a lion acts and what a lion wants. You need to go to the jungle. 

Targeting the right audience is essential for effective marketing. An 80-year-old with no grandkids probably isn’t interested in the latest super soaker technology (unless he’s totally rad). A college student probably doesn’t need dentures yet (probably). Finding the right audience to market to takes time, but once you know who you’re trying to reach and how best to reach them, you’ll finally become a lion marketing expert. 

Create Customer Personas

The first step to learning about lions (and again, by that we mean your audience) is to actually learn what a lion (ideal client or customer) looks, thinks, feels and buys like. If you’re targeting a lion, then you don’t want to target a penguin. Figure out who your audience is. How do you target the right audience? By creating client and customer personas. 

Personas are characters who give you an idea of what the typical or ideal customer looks like. By giving them a name, an age, a background and goals, you can flesh out how a customer thinks and acts. Equipped with this information, you can more accurately find them. You may be surprised to learn that most likely, they won’t be in a zoo. 

Creating customer personas isn’t just a guessing game. The key is to take what you already know about your existing customers, and add some flair to it. Interview some loyal customers or better yet, try to send out customer satisfaction surveys that cover questions like:

• Age
• Gender
• Knowledge of your product or service 
• How did they find your product or service?
• Why did they choose (or not choose!) your product or service over a competitor’s?
• How long did it take for them to make a decision? 
• What was their decision based on?
• Would they purchase again?

Of course, these are just a few examples of questions you may ask, but each one is designed to get to know your customer on both a personal level and a transactional level. What do they make their decisions based on? Are they parents, grandparents, married or single? Knowing the answers to these questions will round out who you’re looking for. You’ll be able to recognize a lion when you see one, whether you’re in the zoo, the jungle or reading a picture book. 

With your ideal customer in mind, you’ll be ready to make real efforts to target those specific individuals, rather than casting too wide a net to catch everybody or anybody. After you create customer personas, then you can draw out a journey map. 

Create Journey Maps

What do you do once you have your new characters in hand? You create a journey map, which details the experience of your customers, including the high points, the low points and everything in between. Knowing the experiences of your customers will help you understand how to improve, adjust and keep certain points. 

In fact, Jonah Sachs perhaps said it best: “Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.”

Mapping out these touch points in a journey map will reveal to you how your customer sees your brand, and how easy it is for them to undergo any given process within your sales experience. If you are selling a car, for example, how do they find your dealership? When they walk in the door, do they want to be immediately greeted? After being greeted, do they want to look around by themselves or do they want to ask questions right away? Is the test drive something they’re interested in the first time they arrive? 

Asking certain questions like these illuminate how your customer experience is in both the ideal start-to-finish purchasing journey, as well as the actual reality, including pain points along the way. Mapping out this journey can be eye-opening, and it is often difficult sometimes to examine. But knowing how hard it is to be your customer is essential for making that experience easier, better and more fulfilling. 

Target The Right Audience

Targeting the jungle lions instead of the zoo lions is what most people want to do. However, many don’t realize that there is a difference. The nuances between how a lion acts in the jungle and how a lion acts in the zoo provide a very different experience. 

The same goes for targeting the right audience, though customers are (usually) less dangerous than lions. With your personas and journey maps guiding your marketing strategy, you are able to deliver more relevant, personalized and targeted content to the right people. Rather than casting a wider net, you’re casting a more specific net. 

Some customers may listen to the radio and get most of their news and information that way. Others are connected to their phones on social media all day everyday. Some are open to cold calls, others are in traffic a lot and looking at billboards. But pouring all your marketing efforts into all of these items is not effective. Good thing you did your research and know what your audience interacts with and values most. Targeted marketing enables you to find the customers you want and the customers who want you. Don’t just make noise, make music. 

Find Lions (Or Other Animals) In the Jungle of Your Industry

Alright, maybe we’re getting heavy-handed here with the lion analogy, but the point stands. Customers act differently depending on the market and industry. Clients want and value certain things. They interact with brands differently based on how they are shopping or what they are looking for. The goal, then, is to figure out what these variables are and take advantage of them.

Creating customer personas and journey maps and informing a targeted marketing strategy based on the relevant data will help power your business to a new level of growth. Your customers will likely remain more loyal than before, and you will find new customers and clients who you may not have otherwise. 

Consider Bullseye Media as your personal jungle tour guide. We will use everything we have to guide you through your customers’ journeys and learn who they are and what they want. We can help create effective journey maps and outline strategies to target the right audience for your business. Contact us to embark on a safari of a lifetime, and learn more about lions, customers and over-the-top analogies. 

Welcome to the jungle.