1. Think like your audience

You know your product. You know what you are working on or the services providing. In fact, you have been eating, sleeping, and breathing your business longer than anyone else. As a result of your personal involvement you have come to identify with certain terms, keywords, and a distinct way of thinking about your business, your product, and the needs your solution meets. This is the first problem you will face. Rather than thinking as the person who has created this amazing business you must think like your audience. When you think like your audience this affects your entire marketing strategy. Everything from the keywords you use in your content marketing to the flow of your campaign workflows within your marketing automation will be affected by the thinking of your target audience.

2. Go where they go

But let’s step back even further. Before you can think like our target audience you need to go where they go. You need to find those locations online (and on social) where your potential customers like to visit. There are several reasons why this step is important. First, by finding and visiting those places where your audience lives you will learn what interests and motivates them. Second, this will help you think like them (see the first point above). When you live a day in someone else’s shoes you have a much better understanding what they are going through, and what they are thinking. You must go where they go. And be mindful that this is not the same for every business. You may find a great audience for your business on Twitter while someone else may find that LinkedIn is their ideal social network hangout.

3. What does tomorrow hold

As a business owner and someone who knows their product and potential market you must do more than just create something your target audience wants today you must create what they will need in the future. You must identify how your market will evolve and do more than just provide a feature set or product that meets their needs today. You have to anticipate what the future holds. Henry Ford has been credited with saying something along these lines:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
More details via HBR

The veracity of the quote aside, the sentiment is true. Often your target audience is unaware of what they will desire in 6 months, 12 months, the future. Your job is to find your target, identify their future desires, and market towards this goal. Obviously this is a challenging task. While you cannot predict the future you should be consistently innovating and pushing the boundaries in anticipation for what will be required in the future.

4. How big is your audience

One of the most important questions you should ask as you seek out your target audience should be how big the potential market is. If you incorrectly identify your audience, if you overestimate the potential you will find your business is producing more than the demand and you’ll fail to be successful. You should look to well-known and respected sources regarding the potential market. As a business owner or marketer you are undoubtedly optimistic. You believe your product is needed by everyone everywhere. This is not the truth. Remember, you can’t be too cautious about believing your own stories. Do the digging, look at the cold hard facts. There are numerous reports and surveys carried out on most potential markets. Some of these reports may require you to purchase them. Do so. It cannot be stressed enough that you understand the true size of your potential market. Failure to accurately identify this metric will leave you standing in an empty room, alone, with an amazing but unneeded product.

5. How big is the room

In addition to the audience but somewhat related, you should also do digging into the size of the room. This means looking beyond the existing audience but the empty space where your audience may expand. This point ties the previous two points nicely together. You need to seek out what the future for your target looks like as well as how big that audience currently is. Then once you have this two metrics you can massage them to forecast the potential future market and ultimately the size of the “room”. In this case you’re looking at the negative space. Where will your product be able to expand and grow and add market share. Within different verticals where are the walls (or ceilings) what are the limiting factors for your audience? Don’t fall into the trap of believing your target is too perfect and beyond the constraints of any room – every business, every product has limitations and boundaries. Identify these early.

6. What does your competition see

If you are in a market where your competitors existed first you have a distinct advantage. Dig into their marketing strategy, their keyword targeting, their landing pages and their email marketing campaigns. Don’t blindly attempt to reinvent the wheel. Look around and see what’s been done already. You can gain an infinite amount of wisdom by learning from the mistakes of others. Just because you are doing something different, something revolutionary, or something never seen before does not mean there is no value in what others have done previously. Learn from what your competitors see. What have they identified as the potential target audience or what leads have the most potential. This is smart marketing. This is smart lead generation. Use the countless hours of others to better find and market to your target audience.

7. Plan smart marketing

This step is listed last because you should complete the first 6 steps first. While you should put a first priority on finding and relating with your target audience this last step is quite important. Once you have found your target audience you need to create a plan to market to them. This smart marketing involves how you create your marketing landing pages, the format and structure of your email marketing campaigns, and the keywords you should focus on when crafting your content marketing strategy. When you know your target audience you will be fully equipped to prepare a marketing plan that meets your potential leads where they live. Mautic has a powerful marketing automation platform capable of organizing multiple campaigns based on your target audience, but perhaps an even greater feature exists. Mautic allows you to test landing pages, keyword strategies, form conversions, and as a result better identify your potential leads. You should be marketing smarter. Mautic helps.

The act of finding and marketing to your target audience is a fundamental building block for a successful business. Following the above 7 steps will help you to have a clear picture regarding your potential audience. Clarity on this aspect of your business will give you unmatched opportunity for growth. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to make informed decisions on future strategies, advanced marketing opportunities, and more. You’ll make the most of your marketing dollars and you’ll be fully equipped for growth and success.

Everything you do should put these two factors, sweet and sticky, to work in your social marketing, email marketing and marketing automation process. Let’s look at what each of these two factors and apply them to your marketing plan.

Sweet

Think about when we spoke in the beginning about perspective. Your want your marketing perspective to be focused on how what you are doing affects your target audience. Target audience is such a cold word, instead think of them as your friends. When you’re speaking with your friends you are sharing, you’re not often speaking to as much as you are speaking with your friends. When you change your perspective you sweeten your communication. Your friends want more. They want to engage and interact with you. You will find the communication becomes a conversation. Like honey, this is a sweet and welcome change from a boring, bland, press release. Your email marketing is not an email blast but merely a sweet start to a continuing discussion or engagement.

Sticky

The second factor is the sticky factor. This is really where your drip marketing comes into play. You should make sure your marketing campaigns and your marketing strategy is focused on the long-term benefits and value offered to your friends. You are not looking for a one time “bounce” from a website visitor. Instead you are seeking to craft content, engineer emails, and lay out landing pages that draw the reader in to do more. Not just doing more but coming back time and again. This is the sticky factor. Drip marketing accomplishes this by providing relevant information at key points in time or at key steps in the sales funnel. You are nurturing your leads along a process. This nurture marketing is focused on being a source of continually engaging, fresh content for your leads.

The Honeypot Approach

These two factors, when used together, create the honeypot approach. They engage the user through sweet content and they keep the user through sticky, repeated visits. When your drip marketing and email marketing focus on these two factors you’ll find all types of improved benefits. You will notice a decrease in your website bounce rate, an increase in repeat website visitors, higher search engine ranking, and ultimately a greater conversion rate.

Use your automated marketing software to engage with your leads at precisely the right time, your email marketing to keep them informed, and your landing pages and forms to keep them coming back.

52% is an incredibly high percentage of your visitors. In addition to that general statistic, it’s also important to keep in mind that the majority of those visitors on a mobile device begin with a search engine query. That means before they visit your site they are on a search engine results page looking for something in particular. They see a link to your site that appears to answer their question and they follow the link. What happens next is crucial.

Step 1: Landing Pages

If you are designing your website to be mobile-friendly then you have conquered step one. Congratulations your website is mobile ready and perhaps you’re using responsive web design to accomplish this goal. You’ve realized the importance of having a mobile presence and you’ve focused some time preparing for this traffic. But this is only step one. If you truly want to see the most success then you need to do more than just re-format your existing website content to fit within a smaller screen. You need to create mobile-specific landing pages.

As every good marketer knows, the landing page is the key to a quick conversion. Having a compelling landing page gives the user just the right amount of information mixed with a quick and easy call-to-action to encourage that next step in the sales process. Landing pages have their own set of guidelines and best practices, we’ve actually discussed this previously on the Mautic blog, and you can read this article, Landing Page Love, if you want to review some features of a good landing page. But mobile landing pages need a slightly different approach. Mobile first landing pages need to take into account several things:

1. Mobile Landing Pages Load Insanely Fast

The first thing you should consider when designing landing pages for mobile devices is the speed at which the page initially loads. Keep in mind that with mobile devices there is a very strong possibility the traffic is coming over a cellular network. These data connections can be much slower than you might find with a traditional computer-based internet connection. Not always of course, but for the most part these devices will load content slower. This means anything that does not specifically relate to this exact page should be discarded or removed.

If you want your visitors to be able to quickly scroll through your mobile landing page then you need to provide them with the content they are seeking quickly and efficiently. Cut down on the javascript files, the extra css, and the many other desktop-centric features of your page that will not even be used by a mobile visitor. Make your page load insanely fast.

2. Mobile Landing Pages Need Unique Propositions

When a visitor lands on your website from their mobile device the odds are much higher they are not simply browsing but they are specifically looking for something. Whether this be an answer to a question, a potential new product, or a service, these visitors are coming with a purpose. Your mobile landing page should be highly focused on returning information to your visitors. This information should not be general details about your great service offerings, or your amazing product, instead your information should be highly configured as a response to the content of their search queries.

Your mobile landing pages should be dynamic and offer exact answers to the query string from the referrer. By providing your visitors with the answer they are seeking they will be far more inclined to read more. These unique propositions may be similar to what you would offer on a desktop landing page but the focus should be highly tuned for the mobile browser.

3. Mobile Landing Pages Need Minimal Feedback

Your mobile landing page should not be a page-long form with input boxes and tons of requirements. We all know that feeling of trying to fill out a form on a mobile device as the page is expanded and shrunk and you try to scroll around to the various input fields. That frustration should never happen when browsing on a good mobile landing page. Remember, if you collect just the basic details on a mobile landing page you can always collect more information later via other forms. Plus, the visitor will be more likely to return to the site from a desktop browser later if they have previously submitted some information.

A strong mobile landing page should request the absolute minimum amount of information from your visitors. They should be organized and structured to fit within a mobile browser and they should change the input type (keyboard layout) automatically based on the context of the field (e.g. an email address).

4. Mobile Landing Pages Are Just The Beginning

Creating a mobile landing page should be looked at as the beginning of a longer relationship. This first point of contact should be quick to engage and quick to encourage a return visit. When you think of a mobile landing page as just the first step you’ll design it to be interesting, eye-catching, and sticky. You don’t want to overwhelm you simply want to inform. A strong mobile landing page like this will capture just a little bit of information from your visitors, not enough to give a headache when filling out a form, but enough to encourage them to return at a later time.

Don’t think you have to give every bit of information to your visitors on a mobile landing page. You’ll do much better if you remember that a mobile landing page is just the beginning of a potentially long and happy relationship with your new visitor.

Mobile landing pages are an incredibly important part of any marketing strategy and should not be neglected. As we see more and more traffic coming from mobile devices we need to be more aware than ever how we target these mobile devices. Specific landing pages created for these browsers will play an ever-increasing role in your marketing success and the eventual success of your business.