Professional Diploma in
DIGITAL MARKETING
1
SUMMARY NOTES - LESSON THREE
Effectively define and engage with your Target Market
2
Table of Contents:
SUMMARY NOTES - LESSON THREE 2
DID YOU KNOW? 3
THE FOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR THIS LESSON ARE TO UNDERSTAND: 3
WHAT IS A TARGET MARKET? 4
HOW DO YOU DEFINE YOUR TARGET MARKET? 4
IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER 5
SOURCES FOR CREATING BUYER PERSONAS: 6
I’VE DEFINED MY TARGET MARKET. WHAT’S NEXT? 7
TARGETING OPTIONS ACROSS CHANNELS: 7
THINGS TO REMEMBER WITH TARGETING: 10
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPS: 11
EXAMPLES OF BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER A SALE 13
ECOMMERCE TOUCHPOINT EXAMPLE: 13
LEAD-GEN EXAMPLE 14
REMARKETING 14
CHALLENGE: 15
Did you know?
● In August 1991, Berners Lee published the first ever website. The site was about the
worldwide Web project describing the Web and how to use it. It was hosted on a
NeXt computer, which was designed by Steve Jobs.
● 42% of small businesses fail because there is no market for their product or service,
and 14% fail because they ignore their customers.
● Studies show that between 70 to 80 % of people research a company online before
visiting a small business or making a purchase.
The four learning objectives for this lesson are to understand:
● How to define your target market using different methods
● Targeting options across different channels - an intro
● How to create a customer journey map
● Remarketing - an intro
What is a Target Market?
Your target market is the group of people who could benefit from your product or service.
Your target audience, on the other hand, are the people you're actively trying to sell to. If
you're starting a business, you can absolutely define an idealistic target market and
audience. But when we touch on customer journeys and buyer personas, you'll be predicting
as opposed to analyzing.
How do you define your target market?
Step 1
It is asking yourself, what problem is your product solving? If we look at clothing as an
example, it's solving the problem of being naked. If we look at an alarm system, it's solving
4
the problem of building safety within a home or business. Entertainment, something like
Netflix, solves the problem of being bored.
Step 2
Step two would be to ask yourself, who are you solving the problem for? You can break this
down. So let's take clothing as an example. Are you selling women's, men's or children's
clothing, or a combination of these? Are you selling to any age or specific ages? Is your
clothing high end or affordable or cheap? Do you offer local, national or global distribution?
There are other questions you could ask yourself, of course. These are just some examples.
Be very specific in terms of what you think your product or service is solving the problem for.
Step 3
Step three is to try and identify any consumer behaviors or interests. Now, what I'm about to
take you through will look a lot like stereotyping, but they are sincerely not meant to be.
Unless you have thousands of data points on your customers, you can't possibly know all
their behaviors and having thousands of data points is more than frowned upon. You can
identify some traits based on their interaction with you and consistent behaviors, but if we
could all be cut down into four or five points, then we'd be incredibly boring and life would
just not be exciting. This step is easier to justify with pre-existing data, but if you're just
starting out, then you won't have this.
So using athletic wear, women's corporate wear and maternity wear as as examples, you
could assume that someone who's buying athletic wear is active. They like to keep healthy
and shop accordingly. They have disposable income dependent on the pricing and they
might be interested in healthy recipes and related content.
For women's corporate wear, you could assume that she is employed and educated and she
cares about looking professional. She wants low maintenance, long lasting wear because no
one has time these days, and she could be interested in beauty products.
For maternity wear, obviously, the woman is pregnant. They would be searching for and
purchasing baby goods. Likely willing to spend money on quality and comfort and possibly
looking at a new home or new car. Now, I'm hoping that you can already start seeing how
these kinds of assumptions / behaviors or interests, how they could benefit you in terms of
your marketing.
5
Step 4
After you've done all that, then you would want to create your target market statement. This
should include your most important demographics and behaviors. A statement would look
something like my target market is female, aged twenty five, who live in the suburbs and like
to do yoga. That's just an example. You don't need to use these exact identifiers because
they might not apply to you. But it is important that you have three to four key points within
your statement.
Important points to remember
If you're providing more than one product or service, a target market needs to be defined for
each offering.
Your target market and target audience will differ as your targeting options won't always fit
your exact market. Try to see this as a good thing, as you will exclude low performers as you
accrue data and you may actually become aware of good performers you hadn't considered.
Buyer Personas
Once you've crafted your target market statement, you would ideally break that down even
more with buyer personas. Now a buyer persona is a fictitious character that represents your
typical target customer, which is generally based on comprehensive audience research.
How do buyer personas help?
You have clearly defined your target customers and can therefore customize your
communication more effectively across all channels. Very important to note, this does
require a lot of data and/or spend.
The insight into your customers allows you to increase performance of your various
segments with marketing campaigns and content that specifically speaks to them.
Remember here that if you don't have pre-existing data, you can still create different
6
campaigns or content based on your predicted target market. And the performance of these
will show in the numbers. If they suck, for lack of a better word, you need to analyze and
change your strategy.
Sources for creating Buyer Personas:
Looking at some sources for creating buyer personas, first up would be analytics. You can
view and analyze demographic data from site visitors and social engagers. Using Google
analytics, like we went through in lesson 2, and any in-platform social media reporting tools.
In terms of employees, particularly the client facing ones, so sales or support, they likely
have a lot of insight into the customers that they talk to. It's a good idea then to ask them all
the same questions and aggregate the answers.
Create and send a survey to your existing database. Spend time on the questions first
asking yourself what information is valuable and then more importantly, what is actionable.
It's all well and good having nice to know information, but if it's not actionable, then it's not
really going to do anything for you.
If you have the budget, invest in one on one interviews or focus groups, as you could pick up
on specific motivations and challenges that are related to your offering. A focus group is
exactly that really. It's a group of people who you put together to focus on your product or
service. You generally have a set list of questions to ask them as well as relying on any
feedback that they give you.
I’ve defined my target market. What’s next?
● You need to look at the channels and their targeting options best suited to your
objectives.
● You need to determine your customer journey so as to help clarify and optimize your
marketing efforts.
● And remarketing strategies will assist with targeting people who did not convert upon
their first interaction with you.
7
Targeting Options Across Channels:
Google ads
We touched on a few of these campaign types in Lesson 1, but this is the full list of available
campaign types in Google ads. We have Search, Display, Smart Display, Shopping,
Universal App. Gmail Sponsored Promotions and YouTube. Just to go through a few of the
lesser known ones, Smart Display is essentially or is the same set up as a display campaign
with the difference being that there is no targeting. It might sound strange, but it's done
automatically by Google and its algorithms. You set a target CPA or CPL and you only pay
for that conversion or that acquisition. Universal App campaigns are specifically for app
installs and engagement. Gmail Sponsored Promotions. If you have a gmail account, I'm
sure you are very well aware of the promotions tab that you can navigate to. And at the top
of that is where you would see the GSP ads.
The targeting options are keywords, so words people search for on the search engine.
Demographics, gender, age, location and income. Income is only available in certain
regions. In-market targeting is people in the buy phase.
Interest or affinity, this means different things on different platforms. For example, Google
ads determines this with tracking cookies. You know those things that you have to accept on
every website. Those those are cookies. They're annoying, but they're actually really
awesome, too. Facebook determines interests by what people include as interests on their
profiles. So you can see that they mean vastly different things depending on the channel
you're talking about. Website topics or content - pretty straightforward.
Automatic targeting, that's just what I was speaking about with Smart Display. It also
happens within Shopping and the Universal App campaigns.
Similar audiences, known as lookalike audiences on Social, are audiences which are
created based on the criteria you specify. For example, website visitors, a similar audience
would target people similar to those visitors.
8
Custom audiences are lists that you upload into a platform. They are generally email
addresses and what people or brands like to do is segment those. So for example, you
would have your most valuable customers - a list of those. And perhaps people who have
subscribed to a newsletter.
Device - you know what this means - it's desktop, mobile or tablet.
Facebook and Instagram
Next up, we have Facebook and Instagram. They are lumped together as they are managed
within the same platform. Campaign types here include Brand Awareness, Reach,
Engagement, Lead Generation, Conversions, Catalog Sales, App Installs, Video Views,
Messages - messages within Facebook - so sending you something via Messenger, and
then store traffic. Store traffic is not available in all regions. Engagement campaigns include
post engagement, page likes and event responses. One of those three is something that you
would choose when setting up that campaign.
The available targeting options are demographics, interests - which we spoke about earlier -
behaviours, page followers, friends of followers, custom audiences, lookalike audiences and
device.
Just to explain a few things a little bit more, Page Followers is pretty straightforward. You
can target the people who are currently following your page. You can then also target the
friends of your followers. The custom audiences are the same as Google ads and then the
lookalike audiences is Google Ads', Similar Audiences.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn, despite its size, I would actually say that LinkedIn is quite a niche channel. You
can see from the list of targeting options that marketing on the platform is centered around
B2B, useful industry related info and events and talent acquisition.
The available campaign types on LinkedIn, are Website Visits, Engagement, Video Views,
Lead Generation, Brand Awareness, Website Conversions and Job Applicants. This last one
9
here, Job Applicants - that's a new campaign type. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but it's
about promoting your job opportunities to top talent. For Website Conversions and Brand
Awareness. You have to select Website Visits, automated bidding and then maximize
impressions or conversions depending on which of those two you are wanting to optimize
for.
The targeting options that you have are demographics, and then this is where it gets really
interesting. You can target companies. So either Connections, specific Industries, Company
Names (not all are available, but a lot are) and then Company Size. You can also target
Education Degrees, Fields of Study, Member Schools, Job, which includes things like
Functions, Titles, Skills and Years of Experience. And finally Member Groups and Member
Interests.
Can you think of how you could use this platform for yourself or a client, which targeting
options would you choose? And what do you think the benefit is?
Twitter
Now we have Twitter and the campaign options. They are Awareness, Tweets,
Engagements, Followers, Website Clicks and Conversions, App Installs, In-stream Video
Views and Quick Promote. Looking at the targeting options that are available, you have
Demographics as usual, Interests, Followers, Keywords, Behaviours, Tailored Audiences
and Movie and TV shows. The Behavior option is only available in the US and UK at the
moment. The Follower targeting works by displaying your Twitter ads to people who are
similar to the followers of the usernames you select. Keywords is based on tweets and
searches. Behaviour Audiences - they're supplied by Twitter Partners and are based on
actual online and offline behaviors, very similar to Google's. They won't fully ever share how
they do it, but it's got to do with the tracking cookies and their algorithms as well. Media and
TV show targeting is another newish campaign option. It allows networks and brands to
promote tweets to people engaged with specific TV shows and movies before, during and
after a telecast. You have two options here. There's either continuous targeting - so
regardless of whether there's a new episode or not, it will continue to target those people
interested in the movie or TV show you've chosen - and new airings only. This would only
serve ads just before, during or after a newly aired episode. If you combine those two
options, it could be an incredibly powerful strategy for various brands.
10
Things to remember with targeting:
Interest targeting - I did mention this before, but within Social, Interest targeting relies on the
information that potential customers have provided. Due to this, it's not necessarily the best
targeting option because people don't always disclose all their interests on Facebook, but it's
worth testing and it could perform very well for you.
Behavioural targeting - there are different ones or different targeting options depending on
the channel that you choose. For example, within Facebook, you can target frequent credit
card users, but within Google ads, that's not something you can do, nor LinkedIn nor Twitter.
So it does differ depending on the channel.
Some platforms only enable Custom Audience targeting once you've reached a certain
spend or the account is older than the required timeframe. Google Ads will only allow custom
audiences after 90 days of the account being active and also a minimum spend of fifty
thousand dollars. That is quite a chunk of money. But depending on the size of the brand, it
can be very easily achieved.
With Age and Gender targeting, if you decide to target this, it's worth noting that in some
platforms you'll only reach people who have disclosed this info. On Google, unless you've
created a Gmail or Google account and specified your gender - as I'm sure you know, there's
also that option that says "I'd rather not say". If you're targeting a specific age, let's say
females who are twenty four years old on Google Ads, then you're potentially missing out on
a huge volume of people who fit that target just because Google isn't aware of everyone's
gender and age within the Google ads and analytics platforms. Then what you'll see is
something called "unknown" and that generally has the most volume. It applies across
multiple things - unknown keywords, unknown genders, unknown ages. So if you're going to
be targeting a specific age or gender, rather include the unknowns, but then exclude the
ages that are specified because then at least you're not going to be targeting people that
Google knows the age or gender of. It's never going to be fully accurate but that's just a
suggestion.
11
Regional constraints - essentially not all campaign and targeting options will be available in
your region. As we saw earlier with Twitter, the behavioural targeting is only currently
available in the US and UK. What generally happens when a channel is rolling out changes,
they do it gradually, so they'll do one region at a time. In that way, even if you read an article
about something that's coming, you might only see it in your account in six months time.
Start off with broader targeting and decrease as you see what is and isn't performing. This is
my recommendation. It does sometimes require a bit more budget, but overall, it generally
does just help you make sure that you're getting the best and the most out of your
campaigns.
Finally, test, test, test. I don't know how much I can stress this. It is so, so important to test. If
you're not sure if something's going to work, test. If you say something isn't working, where's
the data?
Customer Journey Maps:
As I mentioned in the previous lesson, a Customer Journey is a detailed outline of every step
a lead takes to become a paying customer.
The first step is to set clear goals for the map. What goals are you directing this map
towards? Who is it about and what experience is it based on?
Defining goals could be things like subscribing to a newsletter, or submitting a lead, or
putting items in a cart.
For who it is about, this would be going back to your buyer personas and your different
target markets, if you have more than one.
The experience is based on how they got to your site. Was it through social media channels,
Search or Shopping? A different Customer Journey Map would be created for each of these
if they differ.
12
The next step would be to list all the possible touchpoints from view to sale. Now, a
touchpoint is all the places on your website and marketing and content channels that your
potential customers can interact with.
You need to list all the touch points they're using as well as the ones you believe they should
be using. If you have too few touch points, then you need to ask yourself, are they getting
turned away and therefore leaving your site early? If you have too many, is your site
complicated, requiring too many steps to get to a goal?
Next step is to take the customer journey as if you were a customer. The questions that you
need to keep in mind as you go through this process are, where do you go when you have a
problem that needs to be solved? How do you discover the product or brand that will solve
your problem? How do you make your purchase and how do you interact with the brand?
And after the purchase?
Then finally, you would make changes based on your findings. Ideally here you would
conduct an experiment or an AB test to measure whether your changes improve the
experience. Examples of improvements would be, is your lead form too long or complicated?
Are your product descriptions unclear? Are there too many steps to complete a purchase?
Does your sales team need to offer better support?
The reason why I mention the testing or experiments is because it's a really good,
measurable way to see whether the changes that you've made are actually improving
performance. So a test would basically be splitting traffic between your old content. To just
use content as an example, your old content and your new content, you would monitor the
results of both and push whatever's performing better to 100 percent of the traffic as
opposed to splitting it. We are going into experiments in lesson six, but it's a good idea if you
already have a Social Media or a Google Ad account. Play around with it. You'll see
somewhere in the menus, there's a test or experiment. It's sometimes also called a draft.
Look at those things and see what it can actually achieve.
Examples of before, during and after a sale
So Before Sale would be things like your social media channels, your PPC campaigns, word
of mouth, any reviews that are left for you, events that you create, and perhaps your
newsletter. During the sale, the touchpoints would be a physical store, your website, any
promotions, your sales team, the point of sale, and then your online cart if you're an
13
e-commerce site. After Sale would be things like invoicing, marketing, emails, support team,
online assistance, upselling (serving or advertising relevant products to someone who's
already converted), and newsletter subscriptions. That's just a general overview.
Ecommerce touchpoint example:
A potential customer searches for a product and sees your ad (1). She visits your website
(2), browses through your products (3) and puts items into her cart (4) She fills in her
information (5) and makes payment (6) for which she receives confirmation (7). A few days
later, her purchase is delivered (8) and she gives a review based on her experience (9).
Sometime later she receives an email with a discount (10) which she chooses to use. She
clicks on the link, leading her to your landing page.(11) And she then logs into her profile
(12) and adds the products to her cart with the discount applied. As you can see here, within
that one so-called interaction, there are 12 touch points.
I could go even more granular. But this is just to give you an example of how many steps
there are within one interaction.
Lead-Gen Example
Looking at Lead-Gen, a potential customer sees your ad (1), he clicks on the ad directing
him to your landing page (2). He completes the form (3) and chooses his preferred method
of contact (4). Your sales team or staff, contact him (5) and provide clear information,
hopefully.(6) He needs time to make a decision, so to keep your brand top of mind, you
re-market to him (7) with relevant content (8) that reminds him why he should choose your
product or service(9) He requests a callback (10) and takes up your offering (11). He submits
all the required info (12), receives confirmation (13), and when billed (14) he makes a
payment (15). As you can see here, there are 15 different touch points. So what do you do
when people have fallen off the customer journey? How do you target them again? It's a little
something called remarketing, which is fantastic. We're going into this in a lot more detail in
lessons six and seven and module two.
Remarketing
Remarketing is serving targeted ads to an audience that has interacted with your site or
engaged with your social media ads. They are essential as it's a cost effective way to
increase your sales as you're targeting people who have already expressed interest in your
14
products or services. In other words, something interested them enough to click on your ad
to direct them to your site. But for whatever reason, they weren't able to convert or didn't
want to convert. Target them again with other copy that might make them convert.
The standard remarketing lists are, All Website Visitors - that is pretty straightforward. Then,
your Website visitors excluding your converters. And finally all converters. Remarketing lists
generally need a thousand people in order to start running. If you don't have a thousand site
visitors yet I'd still recommend creating the list because it will build up as you get more
volume and then as soon as you hit a thousand people, it's ready to go.
Slightly more complex lists are: Demographic Segments, Time on Site segments and Social
Engagers. The process of creating remarketing lists differs depending on the channel that
you are using. Creating a list within Google Ads is different to creating one in Analytics, even
though they fall under the same umbrella. It's different to creating a remarketing list within
Facebook. Like I said, we're going into more detail in future lessons, but just to explain, the
reason why that is the case is because each channel has its own tracking pixel, no one can
kind of piggyback on the other. Facebook uses its Facebook pixel to determine the tracking
and the metrics that it has in the platform.
It's all very well and good knowing these lists are available. But what can you actually do
with them? Looking at the standard lists, examples of strategies for these could be for All
Website Visitors, you could observe how site visitors perform against your other targeting.
You could target them with different ad copy to your prospecting campaigns. And another
common one actually is that you just increase your bid for all your website visitors versus all
your new visitors. So you're paying more. But it's generally from a performance perspective,
better because you're targeting people who have already expressed an interest in your
product or service. Looking at All Visitors Excluding Converters, you could target them with
special offers or discounts or free trials. For All Converters, you could upsell other products
and you could maintain and increase brand affinity.
Looking at the more complex lists, Demographic Segments could be used to target people
with more relevant ads or products based on the demographics chosen. For example, if
you're selling shoes, you would sell them differently to an 18 year old than you would to a 50
year old. You can also observe performance of certain demographics within your
prospecting campaigns. What I mean by prospecting is that these are campaigns specifically
15
built for new users, not for returning visitors at all. So they're actually excluded in those
campaigns. This is also a really good way to see if there are specific demographics that
perform better for you than others. If it's anything different to what you believe your target
market to be, then it's really an opportunity.
Time On Site, you could serve a different ad copy based on the assumption that more time
on site equals more interest. It's a pretty valid assumption if you think about it. If you're on a
site and you're interested in something, you're going to spend more time on it. Whereas if
you're struggling to find something, then you'd exit the site quite quickly.
Social Engagers, this is specifically an audience for social media channels. You could target
different ad copy to encourage site visits and sales. And it's really good in terms of creating
and maintaining brand affinity. If people are seeing your content and it's relevant, then there
is definitely a chance that they will convert at a later stage if they haven't already.
Challenge:
Using a brand or your own brand, please choose a goal that you would like to achieve. For
example, signing up for a newsletter or purchasing something, you obviously don't have to
purchase something. Just note that you weren't able to complete the whole process. Visit the
website or search for the brand and list all the touchpoints you experienced to get to the end
goal, list the problems you encountered and what you would do to improve on them. Send
your work in any format and any queries you have to marketing@[Link]. I am
really looking forward to seeing some of this work. I hope you do it. It's not compulsory,
doesn't contribute to any of your marks or anything like that, but it does give you a bit more
experience or just kind of applying the knowledge which I find - for me anyway - helps my
brain retain it. So it's for your benefit, but not something that you have to do.
16