Today, marketers have countless ways to reach people, so it’s very easy to get caught up with the latest trends, whether it be TikTok, the Metaverse or mixed reality. However, effective marketing isn't about chasing the next big thing; it's about understanding your audience and their activities and behaviour.
Who are they? Where do they spend their time online? What captures their attention? These are the big questions that matter when creating customer journeys that will drive effective digital marketing and ultimately business growth.
In B2B marketing, a lot of your success depends on precision in targeting. Mainstream media channels that cater to broad demographics often fall short because they do not reach the niche professional groups that B2B marketers target. For instance, while TikTok may be a booming platform for B2C interest-based marketing, it’s generally ineffective for B2B unless your target group is in a field where you can mask your product advertising under the hood on influencer marketing. This can be seen with trends like Gen AI, where influencers are more or less selling their own product, while being helpful in the topic.
B2B marketing requires in-depth research to first determine which channels are most relevant to your specific audience and then to ensure these channels provide the tools necessary for precise targeting. This might involve specialised platforms or industry-specific publications that allow for detailed segmentation and tailored messaging.
The power of niche tools
Thankfully, the digital revolution has equipped marketers with powerful tools to conduct this essential research. Platforms like Sparktoro, Zoominfo, and Audiense can uncover where specific professional groups spend their online time, from social platforms to forums to professional networks. Similarly, tools like SEMrush and SimilarWeb offer insights into traffic patterns and keyword effectiveness, providing a comprehensive view of online behaviors.
These tools are great, not only for discovering where your audience is but also for understanding their online activities, preferences and favourite influencers. This data-driven approach is crucial, particularly in a cookie-less world, where the ability to track and analyze digital footprints accurately has decreased from what it used to be. To better understand the kind of results you can get using these tools to help you, take a look at our work with Outokumpu and Atea, who have both used these tools for improved targeting.
Taking advantage of expansive data sets
While B2C marketing also benefits from precision, the approach can be broader as you generally cater to far wider target groups, even entire demographics. The targeting options of most platforms are already built to reach B2C audiences, so in general it is easier to know what media or platform to try if you are just able to get some data about your target groups interests and motivators.
Platforms like Statista and GWI provide expansive datasets that help marketers tap into large-scale trends and demographic insights, for example Statista’s Consumer Trend Report or GWI’s ‘Connecting the dots’ piece about the same topic. This data can be used to do broader searches with the same tools as you would use for B2B. So, you know your target group is interested in ‘flexitarianism’ - get a list of websites they frequently visit, all the way from verywellfit.com to foodunfolded.com, check out their favourite reddits, podcasts, YouTube channels and social influencers. Just don’t go blind into a media channel that is a “rising trend”.
As the media world continues to expand and transform, the focus should not change from what is truly essential – connecting with your audience on the channels that matter to them. The effectiveness of a marketing strategy is not dependent on the medium’s popularity but on its ability to enable genuine interactions. It’s about leveraging the right tools to gain deep insights into your audience and using those insights to craft messages that not only reach but also resonate.
Let’s be smart and shift our focus from rising and falling media trends, to building connections through strategic, data-driven audience engagement. That way we can ensure that our marketing efforts are not just seen but felt, creating lasting impressions that drive growth and brand loyalty, rather than being dependent on the latest, overhyped channel.
If you are looking to leverage powerful audience insights to drive the effectiveness of your marketing, then talk to one of experts at Luxid.
