If you’re thinking about starting a business, then you’ll get all sorts of advice from experts and not-necessarily-expert well meaning friends. With both specifying the right way to find credit or investment, where you should base yourself and exactly the right way to approach your digital marketing strategy.
Marketing advice can get very complex very quickly, but the one thing you shouldn’t lose sight of is that the purpose of your marketing is to tell your customers about your products. This is a learning that DTC beauty brands have internalised and you can learn from – success for many businesses in that space revolves around building a community of customers, holding open, personal lines of communication and telling them about new products with enthusiasm and credibility, via blog posts and social media, rather than placing digital ads according to an algorithm that surpasses your understanding.
Who Are Your Customers?
If you’re going to communicate with them effectively, you need to know who your customers are. Market research firms can help you build a useful understanding of the people who make up your market with demographic research. This means you’ll have a profile of your typical customers, understanding how old they are, how much money they have to spend, where they live and even what their tastes are. This can help you design adverts to appeal to them and place those adverts where they’ll see them and take notice!
The best market research firms will present not just a single ‘model customer’ but a more nuanced display of market segmentation: the different groups who make up your market, so you can come up with plans about how you will appeal to each of them.
Testing Your Ads
Advertising is often discussed as a creative medium, more like artworks or short films than a business communication, but the truth is that it’s possible to test and quantify the extent to which adverts communicate what they need to.
The same market research firm that built your demographic understanding of your market can help. Creative testing exposes your ads to customers in surveys, focus groups, or even low scale rollouts so you can track how they respond. Launching two different versions of an advert to see how a small audience responds to the different creative elements of each is called A/B testing, and can help you feel confident that your adverts will effectively tell your customers why your products are what they need.
