Targeting 1 min read
Target intent.
Conduct the same exercise in B2C that you would in B2B: geographics, age bands, affluence, search terms.
Every B2C marketer could learn from a chapter in B2B. It teaches you that your audience is way smaller than you’d like to believe.
In the B2B space, if you sell accounting software to scale-up healthcare orgs, your audience is very defined. Your target buyer is a CFO. You make your top 300 target customer list. And you figure out creative ways to start and win over those relationships. Spending money on anything else is a complete waste of your time.
It’s true in the B2C space, too. Who’s your target audience? Well, anybody. You’re wrong.
A digital billboard in an airport is not a good idea unless you’re an airline or have a kiosk within walking distance.
Your target audience is but a small sliver of the world. So conduct the same exercise as you would in a B2B space. Whether it’s geographics, or age bands, or affluence, or search terms.
Give up the shotgun. Take out the scalpel.
Where the money goes to waste
If you are selling education
→
anyone without children in that age group
If you are selling high-end private education
→
anyone without the affluence required to purchase
And even if you’ve targeted those demographic and psychographic factors correctly, are you targeting people who are actually in the consideration set? If not, you have to convince them there’s a problem. That is a much harder problem to solve. To be a great marketer, you have to do both. But it is much easier to sell to people already convinced there’s a problem. And there’s a reason higher ed marketing lives and dies on organic brand and paid search.
Best private college in Boulder, CO. That’s an audience actively shopping. That’s your ideal audience.
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