If I asked you who your target market was, what would you say?
I don’t mean your total addressable market (TAM), but instead, the types of people that make up the audience you want to sell to.
Usually marketers get so wrapped up in the channel or the offer that they completely forget about who they’re trying to reach. That’s right. Instead of asking how or where to find your audience, you first need to define WHO they are.
But it doesn’t stop there. When marketing to your target audience, you need to get really specific. That means breaking it down even further into bite-sized segments.
Once you have your segments mapped out, you can align all of your activities around those specific groups that you want to reach with your message. This will help drive awareness for your product, and hopefully down the line, revenue ?
DISCLAIMER: Just because you’re trying to target a specific group, that doesn’t mean that you can’t sell to other people. Some businesses might not meet your criteria, and they can definitely still buy but they’re not who you’re building your marketing plan for.
To help marketers make sure they’re targeting the right people, we built Drift Audiences. It’s a new way to engage (and uncover) your target audiences with real-time conversations.
Your existing martech tools might tell you who is on your website and who you’re currently engaging with. But Drift Audiences takes it one step further by breaking down your website traffic and showing you where the gaps are – so you know where to take action immediately.
Here are the four audiences you should be focusing on to drive more revenue for your business:
1. Your Ideal Customer Profile
Every company should have an ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s your bread and butter.
For those unfamiliar, it’s a description of a company that is the best fit for your product or service. It’s defined using specific information about a business that would buy from you such as industry, total number of employees, or departments within a company, to name a few.
This broader target audience gives you the flexibility to tailor the message based on many different factors.
For example, you might target enterprise companies that have more than 5k employees. With Drift Audiences, you easily see who is coming to your website from that group and track their engagement.
If engagement or conversion ever looks low, you can quickly spin up a new playbook to drive up those metrics and convert more qualified leads for your sales team.
2. Best-Fit Verticals
For those with a purpose-built product, verticals are your safe haven. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? You built your offering specifically for those people.
But even those with a horizontal product, a vertical strategy can help expand your TAM, accelerate sales cycles, and increase contract values.
If you serve one or more verticals, it’s super important to deliver an experience that’s relevant to them. Everything from your messaging to your content to your offer should be designed specifically for the audience you’re targeting.
One example that’s coming up a lot more lately? Healthcare. Many businesses are seeing an uptick in traffic coming from the healthcare vertical as a result of COVID-19.
Instead of greeting these new visitors with a generic message, Drift Audiences will proactively show you these new audiences that you might want to start engaging based on trends it’s seeing on your website.
So once someone from the healthcare industry lands on your site, they’ll be greeted with a personalized message that was built specifically for them.
3. Your ABM Accounts
An account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is highly targeted. It focuses on accounts, not markets or industries. So instead of relying on broad-reaching campaigns that aim to draw a larger number of prospects to you, ABM focuses on just those prospects that are most likely to buy.
But that doesn’t mean you should go straight for the sale. Not at all. These high-value accounts need to be nurtured. We want a deep understanding of who these people are so we can create the most personal experience for each of them. That means offering help and showing empathy.
For this example, let’s say you’re running a few campaigns targeting your ABM accounts. Drift Audiences will show you how often people from those accounts are making it to your site, engaging with you, and booking meetings.
And to take it a step further, you can greet them with a real-time message from their dedicated rep the second they land on your site to offer assistance and answer any questions they have.
4. Audiences Engaging with Your Marketing Programs
Every channel requires a different strategy. It’s important to know the audience that you’re going to engage through your channels.
By targeting a specific audience with the relevant channel, you’re bringing the right interested people into your funnel (that will ideally convert to revenue).
For example, let’s say you’re running an ad campaign targeting CMOs.
Drift Audiences will tell you how many of those people are making it to your website, how many you’re engaging with, and how many are converting into leads or meetings.
And for those not making it to your site or not engaging with you, you’ll at least know that your ads didn’t resonate with them and can go make the right adjustments to that campaign to drive better results.