Micro-Targeting Your Digital Marketing For More Focused Buyer Profiles

After years of impersonal marketing tactics, digital marketing for B2B businesses has evolved to help you become more connected with buyers. New trends are developing, and one of the strongest moves to consider this year is the process of micro-targeting your prospective customers.

While this might sound invasive, it's really not. You're simply finding information on existing customers to help you seek out prospective customers. In turn, the process becomes symbiotic because you're helping out yourself and those who buy from you. Once you know what your buyers really want, you have a better chance of capturing those people over your competitors.

In the world of B2B, this is critical. You don't want to blend in with the all the myriad competitors out there.  When buyers can't differentiate your products from anyone else's, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant in a sea of other B2B businesses clamoring to get ahead.

CREATING PERSONAS

One of the crucial points of micro-targeting is something that's actually been around a while: creating buyer personas. This involves digging into existing data you already have on your customers and finding attributes that fit the ideal prospective buyer. This could be multiple personas. It's not much different from creating a character for a novel.

Much like fiction mirrors reality, your personas also mirror buyer reality. With accurate information about what buyers want, you're better able to tailor your marketing strategies.

In your persona development, you can break it down into multiple categories where you'll discover plenty of detailed information for each.

YOUR CUSTOMER NEEDS

What do your buyers really need to solve their problems? Many businesses that bought from you in the past probably had a specific problem that you were able to solve for them with your products. Whether it's something as simple as you're saving the customer money or you're including a particular feature in your product that your competitors don't have, look into the details of what worked before.

YOUR CUSTOMER LIFESTYLES

When you find out what the lifestyles are of your past or current buyers, you further encapsulate what they want. You'll be surprised at how much you'll learn about customers by studying what products they typically buy, the amount of money they spend, and what their own business practices are like.

Much of this takes deeper study, including participating in social media to find out what people are talking about under specific hashtags.

YOUR CUSTOMER MOTIVATIONS

By studying social media conversations and seeing what past customers bought from you, you also see what prospective buyers are most apt to buy. It may not always be what you expect, so it pays to investigate this thoroughly.

One thing never wanes with B2B buyers: most of them just want valuable information about what distinguishes you from everybody else. They also want information they can't find anywhere else, including on Google.

REAL-TIME CONVERSATIONS

Part of the micro-targeting process now includes real-time conversations for target messaging that brings a quicker call to action. For this, social media is already playing a part where instant conversations are possible using hashtag searches.

When starting natural conversations, remember to avoid any hard sell tactics so the recipient doesn't think you're spamming them. Even so, real-time conversations allow you to tie in your B2B products with something your prospective buyer relates to, or that's in the news.