Identifying an Effective B2B Target Market for Ads

There’s a very popular term in the world of marketing that goes something like, “talking to everyone is talking to no one.” This maxim is particularly true in the overly competitive B2B world, where the ability to understand exactly who you are targeting with your marketing streamlines your efforts.

Make your marketing strategy more effective by tailoring your communications and materials to the right audience. This process involves refining how to speak to them in a way that resonates. Do you know how to tailor your output to their needs and desires? Can you hone your products and services to whatever it is your target customers want?

Read on for our simple tips to position yourself correctly in the market and attract more customers. Stop targeting everyone, everywhere today!

Understanding Your Product or Service’s Need

Choosing a target market is all about speaking to the people who are actually likely to invest in your products or services. The vital question is, how do your products or services help your customers solve their problems?

Discover the answer by listing the primary features of your product or service. Highlight the benefits of each and reverse engineer the issue they solve. For example, if you are selling a form of automation, you are working to save your customer time.

This list of benefits is the first step in identifying your target market. The second step is to think about who might benefit from those features. In the example above, your target market is companies with time-consuming manual processes. Once you’ve identified your brand’s benefits and their intended market, tailor your communications and landing page to ensure an effective sales funnel. Need help creating landing pages? Use a landing page platform that offers 500+ customizable templates built to help you increase your advertising conversions.

What Does Your Current Customer Base Look Like?

You already have some very helpful information that will tell you a lot about the audience you should be targeting: your current customer base. The people that already buy from you likely have something in common, and this commonality is important to identify. Armed with this information, you can engage in marketing strategies like creating B2B Facebook ads that actually convert.

Learning about your customers can be done in a number of ways, including:

• Talking to them directly
• Running surveys to gather more information 
• Looking at sales, customer relationship management (CRM), or other data
• Assessing social media profiles

When learning about your customers, keep an eye out for any similar characteristics, locations, interests, and industry similarities. Collate the parallels and rank them based on which customers are most profitable.

Understanding Your Competition

No matter what business activity you are trying to master, a good understanding of your competition is vital. This understanding is particularly relevant when trying to discover your target audience. Which businesses are your competitors targeting? Identify around five of the biggest brands in your industry, then look at the business types they are targeting.

Do they aim their products and services at small businesses? Locals? Marketing or finance departments? Chances are they have done some legwork to figure all of this out, so save yourself time and effort by following their blueprint. Identify who they are targeting and be sure to look for audiences they might have overlooked. Larger organizations will have higher budgets so while you follow their lead, keep an eye on the sectors that they aren’t targeting.

Deep Dive Into Your Data

If you are a copywriter, you need a great copywriting portfolio; if you are a B2B marketer, you need amazing data sets. While high-level information about your audience is helpful, you will likely see better results if you get a deeper understanding of the types of people your product or service can help.

Start with an overview of a potential target market, then dive into the psychographics of your customers. This includes the personal characteristics of your audience, such as personality, values, hobbies, behaviors, and lifestyle. Identify the similarities in these aspects and the type of business they have and then determine how your offerings tie in with their marketing persona.

Consider which features of your products or services are the most appealing and beneficial to these types of people.

Your Perfect Customer Persona

All of the information you find from the methods above gives you the ability to create the ultimate customer persona for your business. The more in-depth you get with your customer persona, the easier it is to create tailored marketing communications and design better products and services to suit their needs.

Make sure your customer persona includes demographic and psychographic information to gain an accurate picture of the types of people and businesses you should speak to. Match this information with creative automation, the process of automating parts of the production of creative assets, and you’ll save time on your marketing strategies while also making them more effective. 

How Best to Contact Potential Buyers?

Now that you are armed with all this helpful information, how do you reach the customers you identified? There are obviously many channels. Paid ads, social media, and even the simple yet effective B2B email marketing strategy.

While there is no single correct answer, the demographics you’ve uncovered will point you in the right direction. Perhaps there are social media groups that target the personas you have identified. Maybe you can write helpful FAQs that target gaps in certain industries to demonstrate your brand as an authority in your field. Whichever option you choose, the deep dive you’ve taken into your customers will reveal the best places to find them.

Market Smarter, Not Harder

Spend a little extra time and effort on the above actions and you will see marked improvement in your marketing reach. Read our article about social media advertising tips to hone your communications even further. The more time you put into your marketing planning, the greater the outcomes will be!

As always, our Hero Blog is a helpful resource where you can further your knowledge, hone your strategies, and get more from your marketing efforts.