Know Your Market Audience and Avoid Wasting Your Budget!

 

  When it comes to marketing, there is hardly anything more crucial than having a solid understanding of who your ideal customers are. What if, however, I told you that more than half of the marketers out there are missing important information on their customers? Only 42 percent of the more than 1,200 marketers who participated in our annual study had a basic understanding of the demographic information that pertains to their target audiences, such as the audience members' names, genders, and locations. And the information void doesn't end there: fewer than half of marketers are aware of the interests and hobbies of their target audience, as well as their shopping patterns, the products they are interested in purchasing, their purchase history, and the locations where they consume content. Only 31% of businesses are aware of the online groups that their target audience is a part of, and an even less percentage is aware of the issues that this audience faces. Only one-fourth of marketers are aware of the social concerns that are important to their target demographic. This is a significant wasted opportunity when it comes to expressing the values of your company, particularly when marketing to Generation Z and Millennials.

 

Let's take a look at the most significant obstacles that marketers must overcome in order to obtain the data they require, and then talk about some potential remedies to the mismatch that exists between marketers and their audience.

 

A staggering 82% of marketers believe that having high-quality data on their target audience is essential to being successful in their profession; nevertheless, more than half of them think that they are lacking vital information.
Why is it then that it is so difficult for marketers to acquire the data that they require? When it comes to knowing their target audience, the primary obstacles that marketers have may be boiled down to two main issues:

Data privacy restrictions are making it more difficult for marketers to access the data about customers that they require. Concurrently, customers have shown a decreased willingness to share their personally identifiable information.
As a consequence of this, marketers miss out on crucial data regarding their target audience, including essential information regarding their buying and media consumption patterns in addition to fundamental demographic details.

The lives of consumers have seen significant transformations over the past few years, and with an economic downturn on the horizon, it is likely that their routines, attitudes, and tastes will continue to evolve rapidly.
The aforementioned two difficulties are tough to solve due to the fact that they are actively developing as data privacy standards get more stringent and as previously unimaginable occurrences that influence customer behavior continue.
So, what options do marketers have at this point?

 

1. Compile information from your own sources.

The collection of one's own first-party data is an excellent strategy for dealing with rising data privacy restrictions such as Google's planned phase-out of third-party cookies. First-party data can be obtained from a wide variety of sources, including but not limited to your website, surveys, emails, SMS messages, and your CRM system. First-party data is information that originates directly from a company's customers. This type of data provides high-quality insights into a company's audience and enables the company to create a more tailored experience for that audience.

Only 27% of marketers believe that their marketing data is fully integrated with their systems and tools. As we saw in the previous section, one of the primary challenges that marketers face when attempting to identify their target audience is that their data does not integrate well. Data on marketing that is not connected is difficult because it is impossible to have all of the necessary contexts to make judgments based on the data. On the other hand, linking all of the data points you have via a single source of truth provides you with a comprehensive image of the people you are trying to reach. Another way in which a single source of truth can help enhance efficiency is by making marketing data more readily available to marketers and the people who work with them.

We discussed how the lifestyles of customers are continuously evolving, and how in order for marketers to keep up with these changes, they must data that is current. During the course of the pandemic, the interests, routines, and perspectives of the audience you are trying to reach most likely underwent a number of shifts. And with a recession on the horizon, it is possible that your audience may shift once more; therefore, whichever kind of data tracking you employ, make sure that your data is routinely updated so that you can maintain a real-time pulse on your clients. You also need up-to-date information about your target audience so that you may adapt your marketing strategy and messaging in response to the changes that your clients are going through. This is another reason why you need this information. Not only did more than half of all marketers change their approach in 2021, but of those that did, 83% modified their strategy between two and four times in a single year. In addition, 20% of marketers changed their strategies in 2022 as a result of the possibility of a recession, and there is a good chance that this trend will continue in 2023. It goes without saying that you need to have a backup plan in case things don't go as planned. Will you have the data you need to adapt when the next occurrence that has never happened before or the next unforeseen obstacle arrives? In a perfect world, you would have access to any and all data points that you could possibly require, but in the actual world, this isn't always the case.