The “lead nurture campaign” is one of the key objectives for marketing automation users. A critical part of the process is to know your audience or more specifically, have a clear idea about your buyer.
June Eloqua User Group Webinar | Episode 1
3 part series | Lead generation, capture & nurturing
In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, the key to achieving remarkable results lies in understanding your target audience. By developing & designing ideal client profiles, digital marketers can enhance their lead generation, lead nurturing, & Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) objectives. In this blog, we will explore the significance of an ideal client profile & provide you with actionable insights to help you unleash the full potential of your marketing efforts.
Defining your Ideal Client Profile:
The ideal client profile serves as a comprehensive description of the type of customer who aligns perfectly with your brand, values, and offerings.
It goes beyond demographics and encompasses crucial elements such as psychographics, behaviours, pain points, and goals.
By defining your ideal client profile, you gain a deep understanding of your target audience’s motivations, challenges, and desires, enabling you to craft highly targeted marketing campaigns.
Identifying key demographics and psychographics:
To develop an accurate ideal client profile, digital marketers must gather data on key demographics and psychographics. Demographics include age, gender, location, occupation, and income, providing a basic understanding of your audience. Psychographics delve deeper into their interests, values, attitudes, aspirations, and lifestyle choices.
Collecting this information through surveys, your subscription & preference centre, interviews, or analytics tools empowers you to create personalised content that resonates with your target audience, fostering a stronger connection and driving lead generation.
Firmagraphic data, or details about the company or organisation can be sourced in a range of ways. You can send account data to data services like Ilion Australia or Dun & Bradstreet who will then enhance your data with missing information. This can be a worthwhile investment, especially if account-based marketing high on your priority list.
About Episode 1
Demographics is the study and classification of people according to their attitudes and aspirations, especially in market research.
Psychographics are the psychological and cognitive attributes of a consumer that reveal their beliefs, values, and goals.
Firmographic data comprises distinct attributes of organisations, companies, or businesses that can aid in segmenting markets and pinpointing premium clients.
What is Digital Body Language™ & how can it help you design your target audience?
Digital Body Language refers to the online cues and signals that individuals emit through their digital interactions, such as emails, social media posts, and website engagement.
Just like in face-to-face communication, these non-verbal signals play a crucial role in understanding the intent, emotions, and engagement level of the audience in the digital realm.
As a digital marketer, being attuned to and interpreting digital body language can provide valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, interests, and needs, enabling you to tailor your marketing strategies and campaigns more effectively.
Conducting market research
Market research plays a vital role in refining your ideal client profile. Dive into competitor analysis, industry trends, and customer surveys to uncover valuable insights about your target market. Discover what sets your ideal clients apart from others in the market, including their pain points, desires, and purchasing behaviours.
This research will guide your marketing strategies, enabling you to address their specific needs effectively, differentiate yourself from competitors, and position your brand as the ideal solution.
Platforms like Sprinklr serve an important role in helping to gather relevant information across the internet from Social sites, blogs, discussion groups etc. These sources may not be readily available to more traditional methods of marketing research.
Don’t forget your 1st-party data, there will be nuggets of gold amongst your own data. Look for & find them.
Most clients I work with have massive amounts of data. Knowing how to analyse this data is often the roadblock to greater personalisation. A paradigm shift is often needed and that shift relates to the design of your audience.
Audience creation can be done in several ways but is often “let’s email the entire database” vs. a more considered approach based on available demographic, psychographic and firmographic data.
Taking a step back to review your campaign objective is a great start. If you have a persona strategy in place, are you able to easily filter your audience based on a persona and other available digital body language?
If the answer is no, we’re in a position to provide you with some assistance, CLICK HERE to share your questions. Meanwhile, keep reading…
Creating buyer personas & understanding your buyer’s journey
Once you have gathered sufficient data, it’s time to bring your ideal client profile to life through buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal clients, combining key demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits.
Give each persona a name, job title, and personal background to make them relatable. This step helps your marketing team visualise and empathise with your target audience, aligning their messaging, content, and communication channels accordingly. By tailoring your lead generation and nurturing strategies to each persona, you can deliver personalised experiences that resonate deeply with your prospects.
The assignment of a persona value to a lead or contact is often the most challenging part of this process. It could be done manually by the CRM user and assigned to a CRM lead or contact. Marketing may also be able to help derive persona values based on form submission data, a cleverly asked question, or the types of content that a lead or contact is engaging with.
Tailoring your content & campaigns
Armed with a well-defined ideal client profile and buyer personas, digital marketers can craft highly targeted content and campaigns.
Tailor your messaging, visuals, and calls to action to address the pain points, motivations, and aspirations of each persona.
Use the right communication channels and platforms preferred by your ideal clients to maximise engagement and reach.
Personalisation at every touchpoint increases the effectiveness of lead generation efforts and nurtures prospects along their buyer journey, culminating in the identification of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that are ready to be passed on to the sales team.
Use Lead Scoring to enhance your MQL process, or to automate the delivery of leads to the Sales team
Eloqua’s co-dynamic lead scoring is a dynamically changing value assigned to all contacts in your database. It’s not accumulative i.e. 10 points for filling in a form + 5 points for opening an email etc and shazam 100 points = an MQL!
A person’s profile and their engagement with your digital assets changes over time. It’s Eloqua’s ability to apply recency to engagement e.g. “Have they clicked on at least 5 emails in the past 2 months, 4 months or 6 months” that makes all the difference.
By evaluating a person’s lead score as they’re progressing through your nurture campaign, you can potentially look to adjust the cadence of your communications. The more engaged they are and the better fit they become when measured against your Ideal Client Profile, you can better tailor their journey.
More to come on this topic in the July 2023 Eloqua User Group. Click here to register.
Our top 5 points for you to take away from this post
- Ideal client profiles are essential for lead generation and nurturing MQLs. They help you target your marketing efforts more effectively and attract the right leads.
- Ideal client profiles should include demographics, psychographics, and firmographics. This information will help you understand your target audience better and create marketing messages that resonate with them.
- Ideal client profiles should include data from market research where possible. This will help you ensure that your profiles are accurate and up-to-date.
- Ideal client profiles should be used to develop buyer personas. Buyer personas are detailed representations of your ideal customers. They can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and content.
- Ideal client profiles should be reviewed and updated regularly. As your business grows and changes, so too should your ideal client profiles.
