Foundation of digital marketing

Any marketer will tell you that you need to know who you’re marketing to before you worry yourself with marketing tactics.  It makes sense, I mean, who are your marketing messages for if you don’t really know who you’re trying to attract to your brand, to your business, to buy your products/services?

What’s interesting, in my opinion, is that so many folks marketing with social media and digital marketing tactics seem to be putting tactics before their target.  In other words, they’re jumping in to message to folks online via social networks without really having identified who exactly their message is designed for.  Such efforts are often executed in vain, and one shouldn’t be surprised when the result of such actions doesn’t really produce the results one had in mind.

By taking some time to define who your ideal client is, you can more specifically craft marketing messages that will likely resonate with particular people or groups of people.

I often encourage solopreneurs not to get too overwhelmed with this process, but certainly it is a crucial initial step that does need to be thought through thoroughly.

A good place to start might be asking yourself, trusted friends or current/past clients (if you have them, unless you’re just starting out) what their challenges are that your product/service solves for them.  Ask why they would buy from you, and what it is about your product/service that is attractive to solving their challenge.  Based on some of that information and coupled with your vision/company goals, build a persona of who your ideal client is — what characteristics do they have, both demographic and psychographic (where they live, income level, gender, etc. as well as buying habits, interests/hobbies).

By understanding who your ideal client is (and when I say ideal, I mean ideal for your business and ideal in terms of who you most enjoy working with) you’ll be better equipped to create marketing messages to fuel your digital marketing strategy with tactics that serve a purpose toward your larger business objectives.

Here’s an interesting article from Content Marketing Institute that gets a bit deeper.

Posted by: Nick Ventuerlla