Our most recent #pipelinemarketing Blab centered on “How to Find Your Target Audience”. It included guests Daniel Houtz, Marketing Manager at Chequed.com, and Dave Rigotti, Director of Marketing at Bizible.
Dan, Dave and Peter Dean, RenderTribe CEO, discussed the most effective approach to finding and leveraging the target audience by taking an amalgam of historical data, titles, the problem the solution solves and aligning sales and marketing to find patterns. They also identified some great tools that accomplish this.
Our moderator, RenderTribe CEO Peter Dean, asked some related questions. Here are the questions and some highlights from the conversation:
Q1: How do you find your target audience?
Dave said, at Bizible, they focus on who represents their best customer. The “best customer” can be defined different ways: how much they are using the product, the revenue outcome of success, and other key factors. Dave also said they use a tool called Datanyze to decipher what technologies their best customer uses and they use this data, along with other data, to garner a historical view to identify a good customer in the future and market to that group.
Dan said that Chequed.com uses Bizible to find their target audience. He also mentioned they focus on their best customers as well, and leverage historical data to see what problem they are solving and how they are solving it. Once an audience profile is established, you can market to gain access to that audience.
Q2: What kind of data/software have you used to get there?
Dan said they use a proprietary BI tool, Bizible, Salesforce, Pardot (soon), and company size, industry, title and the content they looked at to determine target audience.
Dave highlighted the information they gather from the internal success team, in addition to data from Salesforce, Datanyze and from there they decipher the path successful companies are taking.
Q3: How do you leverage that data over time?
Dan said timing is a huge part of how they leverage the data. They look at what time of year, historically, the content is being sent and when it works best.
Dave agreed with Dan that timing is an important part of making a full funnel piece. It is also important to change marketing channels as the marketing mix results in change.
Audience Question: How do you market to your target audience?
Dan said he starts with a contact calendar to plan out content and target a certain target persona. It is also important to implement marketing tactics that integrate with existing pieces of marketing technology. He also makes it a goal to blog and make sure to address the problem the target audience is trying to address; in essence, becoming a thought leader in the industry you represent. He also suggested hiring RenderTribe (shameless plug) or another third party to find and market to the target audience.
Peter said, “Don’t fall in love with the ideas, fall in love with the results.”
Summary Statements and Blabber Resources
Dan mentioned, “If all else fails, take the Pragmatic Marketing approach – which is a great course, by the way – and start from the ground level. Try to find the market where your product solves the problem.” He also said: Market to your audience by focusing valuable content around solving their problems, become a thought leader @DanHoutz. He also provided the following resource to help identify a company’s target audience: http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckcohn/2015/02/06/steps-to-identify-your-target-market/
Dave said, “Spend the time to define who your customer is, who you’ll be going after next” @DRigotti. He also suggested visiting their blog: Bizible.com/blog
