Primary Times - the definitive what’s on and where to go family guide of activities and events for children of primary school age. Things to do with your kids during the school holidays including arts and craft activities, music and theatre for children, parties, competitions, days out, and family attractions along with term time drama schools, dance classes, after school clubs and sports activities. Things to do at a place near you!
Marketing Tips | July
Tip 7 - Fish where the fish are!
Do you know where your customers go for their information? You need to have a solid understanding of your customers, what their drivers are and where they seek information. Only then can you give them the information they want, in the right format and the right place.
How well do you know your customers?
Do you know your ideal customer is? You might know that they are parents with primary-aged children, but that’s just demographics. And that’s simply not enough to build a solid marketing program. To get maximum bang for your marketing buck, you need to build up a detailed picture of your customers:
- Who are they?
- What are their challenges?
- What issues do they face?
- Where do they go for information?
- What are their ‘moments of need’ – or at what point are they most likely to use your product/service?
The best way to establish this is to ask your customers. We’ve produced a helpful article on this for you (link to customer insight article). You can marry customer insight with analytics information that you have to hand, for example, analytics from your website and social media channels.
Once you’ve created a detailed view of your customer, you need to ask yourself ‘how does my brand improve my customers lives? What problems do I solve and why do customers choose me over my competitors?’
For example, do you give families an amazing day out during the holidays, do you help families to feed their children with healthy, organic food? Once you have a clear view of what customers need, you can develop impactful and targeted marketing.
Needs-based segmentation
This is where you are going beyond demographics and using the information you have researched on your customer’s needs. Let’s look at an example for a visitor attraction.
Your main target audience is parents with primary aged children. However, this is a very broad group. We all know families come in different shapes and sizes – they are not a homogenous group. If you treat them as such, you run this risk of running average marketing campaigns and missing opportunities to really engage with your customers. You need to segment this further, for example:
- Single parent families
- Fulltime working parents
- Home educator parents
- Greenliving parents
- Blended families
- Outdoorsy families
You have defined the above broad sub-segments, but you need to drill deeper to create a view of your customers and their needs – taking the first three segments, this might look like this:
|
Segment |
Pain points / Needs |
Information sources |
Content and messaging |
|
Single parent families
|
Raising kids on a tight budget
Finding ways to make the most of family time within a tight budget.
|
Parenting websites and Facebook groups, Primary Times, friends and family |
|
|
Full-time working parents
|
Feeling guilty about working full-time
Making the most of family time during weekends and holidays
Managing work and childcare in holidays
|
Parenting websites and Facebook groups, Primary Times, friends, colleagues and family |
|
|
Home educator parents
|
Providing children with enriching educational experiences and company, to compliment home learning. |
Home educator websites and Facebook groups, LEA information, Teachout/Primary Times, friends and family |
|
This is a somewhat basic example, but it’s designed to show you how to map marketing content to different customer groups. You are more likely to see results from your marketing if you create relevant content and offers for specific groups, rather than trying to target one huge homogenous group.
Think about how your audience will be engaging with your content. Is it on desktop or smartphones? If your Google Analytics shows it’s mostly on smartphones, think about creating short and easily consumable content forms. If you’re using video, use text as it’s likely to be watched with the sound off. Marry this information with the channels you need to focus on. Where do your customers go for information? Wherever they go, that’s where you need to be.
Remember, things change, so you need to review your approach to customer segmentation and targeting at least once a year. It’s not an easy thing to get right but when you do, you’ll reap the benefits.