Buying power within an org can often shift. For example, in martech it could be assumed that the marketer is the buyer, but it can just as well be the product team or tech teams are involved as well. So how do you market to audiences you’ve never marketed to before?
The role of the marketer is not only to execute on marketing strategies but to understand the buyer. Keeping a careful watch on who your prospects and customers are and knowing when anything shifts are critical to ensuring future growth.
When your plan needs to incorporate new audiences and personas: embrace it. New opportunities mean new ways to grow, even if it may seem complicated.
Getting to know your new audience
Getting started in understanding new audiences is done exactly how you’d normally do it – research. Start speaking with your sales and CS teams about the new people they may speaking to. Try to understand why they are suddenly involved in the process and how they will be involved. Build your personas the same way you’d typically do it, and determine the weight of this new persona – how far should you go in marketing to them?
Marketing to your new audience
While it can be an unexpected challenge, it should be exciting if this is an audience you’ve never expected to market to and have no experience with. These are the moments I savor as a marketer: how to build different campaigns to optimize and test on.
Start with your message
Does your existing message accommodate your new target audience? If not, great, create a message that will hit home. Keep your core positioning and narrative in mind. Take note of the Jobs To Be Done framework to create messaging that will resonate.
Take it easy with the tactics
If you haven’t had experience with the persona you’re going after, you won’t want to build out a fully built out campaign with many channels just yet. Start with 2-3 channels max and optimize them (or discard them if they aren’t working). This is especially important if the new persona you’re dealing with is important to the process, but not the make or break vote in the purchase – or you could be burning a lot of money targeting this audience.
Optimization means experimenting
With the above, identifying the best channels will involve experimenting. So grow this segment by doing what you’d normally do when building out your first campaign. Set goals, and work towards them.
Going after a new audience can be daunting if you haven’t worked with them before, but just remember that the foundations of marketing remain the same. Do your research, watch and optimize, and enjoy learning how to target a new audience!
Header Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash