Not all your customers want to buy (TODAY)!

What do you mean who are we marketing to? My clients, obviously!

That kind of thinking is what has gotten you to turn your back on marketing or think of it as something that only huge corporations with budgets in the millions can do well. Time to shed some light on Audience Types!

It's all well-and-good to advertise by putting up banner and posters all over your local area, or by sponsoring that one post on Facebook which is somehow doing better than the other ones, but the answer to the question "what do you get out of this?" is most certainly NOT as simple as saying "sales!"...

Put simply, there are 3 main types of audiences: The Cold; The Warm; & The Hot.

The image above is part of a marketing document which I have been developing for years. This document is where I create Marketing Strategies for clients, and this table lies in the "Visual Insights" section for "Customer Profiles". The document may require several articles to explain in detail, but for now I would like to focus on these 20 cells above. Let's take it column by column, discussing the different audience types:

The Cold Audience

Also known as the "Awareness" or "Reach" segment are the people in this world who match one of your "Ideal Customer Personas" but they have never heard of you or even seen a post by you before. For this reason, we focus our advertisements on "Reach" or "Impressions". These types of ads rarely lead to sales immediately and their conversion rates are low, but that isn't the outcome we are looking for from them anyway. For now, all we want to do is lead the people from being part of the Cold Audience to the Warm Audience. All advertisements which target Cold personas, should target your Ideal Customer Personas aka. your Saved Audience or Lookalike Audience (depending on the social media platform you're using). The type of content that works best here is informative, educational, and generally looks to simply stick in people's minds a little bit longer than what your competitors might be doing.

The Warm Audience

So, you've made some ads and people now know you exist? Brilliant! So what are you going to do with all this power? Well, now it's time to engage with your potential customers. Yes, that's right - we're going to strike up conversations! Preferably, these conversations aren't all one-way and you can create an environment in which the people can feel comfortable talking. If only someone had written another article on something like this... Maybe it would be called something to do with "Community Building" - maybe? (P.S. Do go and check it out after - I'll link it at the end of this article). In short, the Warm Audience is at a stage of getting to know you and your business. Give them entertaining and engaging videos to watch, share your firm's story and make sure to make customer testimonials available for them to read too. Discuss Pain-&-Gains related to their current situation and the benefits from your products and services. Your goal is to move the clients from people who have barely started to understand your business to people who trust your brand and are ready to purchase whatever it is that you're selling.

The Hot Audience

Nope - not an inappropriate reference, I swear - we're talking about those who are now finally willing to purchase. They've gone through this extensive customer journey to end up at your website's landing page. And what? You are making them jump through hoops just so they can find your store because you didn't want to seem "too pushy" having a "Buy Now" button on the top of your landing page? Well you may just have lost a customer you have worked on for the past 4 months. Words to live by - "Make. It. Simple." - if people who are going to your website to learn more about what you offer - make sure they can find out in less than 2 minutes. If they want to purchase from you - make sure they can do that in one. Have a Call-To-Action on your social media posts and lead your client to their desired goal of purchasing something from you. These are the ads which actually bring in sales and where conversions start looking impressive, but you will have zero sales if all you do is focus on these clients without paying any attention to the other audience types. Clients don't just wake up one day saying they'll buy from you. It's a Customer Journey for a reason - adjust your budget appropriately (as shown above, though each firm is different so hire an expert to break it down) and lead them through to the desired goal.

Now, as promised, here's the link to that article I mentioned, and be sure to comment any other topics you'd like me to delve into: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/building-community-why-bother-lenard-adanov/