• How to Identify Your Target Audience: Marketing Tools & Tips

    How to Identify Your Target Audience: Marketing Tools & Tips

    You can’t build your marketing strategy on guesswork. Whether you’re launching a new product or revamping your marketing strategy, knowing exactly who you’re talking to, what resonates with them, where they spend their time-consuming content and how they make buying decisions is imperative. 

    But let’s be real: marketing is expected to show results quickly and comprehensive market research or custom surveys can be expensive. Not every brand can invest years and spend $100k + on research projects. The good news? You don’t have to. There are smart, data-backed ways to zero in on your target audience using tools and tactics that are more accessible and just as effective when applied strategically giving you the opportunity to sale your research to balance your need for speed, depth and investment. 

    Here are some of the best tools and tactics to help pinpoint your target audience and craft a marketing strategy that will drive results. 

    1. Brandwatch: Social Listening at Scale

    • Discover trending topics among online chatter and news that would impact buying behavior before they hit mainstream  
    • Understand which social platforms your audience interacts with the most help to inform your paid and organic social strategy and where it is worth investing your marketing dollars  
    • Identify niche conversations and emerging themes online among your key stakeholders allowing you to tailor your campaign messaging to exactly what your audience is looking for 
    • Uncover demographic breakdowns of your target audience for smarter segmentation of your campaigns to ensure your message is getting in front of the right eyes 

    2. NetLine Audience Explorer: B2B Insights, On the House

    For B2B marketers, NetLine’s free Audience Explorer tool is a hidden gem. It allows you to dig into target audiences by job function, seniority, company size, industry, and region allowing you to better understand the behaviors of your specific audience. NetLine provides real intent data allowing you to fully build out your buyer personas and truly understand what they care about based on their latest content consumption habits.  From there, it gets even more useful: 

    • See what content formats your audience prefers 
    • Uncover trending research topics 
    • Align your content strategy with message themes they’re actively consuming 
    • Determine areas in the country your audience is most prominent in 

    3. Stakeholder Interviews: Get the 1st-Party Intel 

    Hearing directly from your customers and/or former prospects provides highly valuable nuances you can’t always get online. Talking to your audience in real-time gives texture to the data insights you obtain elsewhere, further bolstering your overall strategy. It is important to select key players from a variety of teams such as marketing, sales, customer service, operations and C-Suite in order to gather well-rounded insights. 

    • Identify core pain points and motivations 
    • Discover messaging nuances that resonate 
    • Pinpoint key opportunities or challenges from the people in the trenches 

    These conversations can shape everything from brand positioning to campaign strategy. 

    4. Job Postings: A Surprising Source of Insight 

    Think of job descriptions as mini roadmaps into your audience’s world. They reveal: 

    • Day-to-day responsibilities 
    • Skill sets and strengths 
    • Who the decision-makers are and what matters to them 
    • Potential gaps in their day-to-day responsibilities your product or solution can help fill 

    If your audience includes IT Directors or Marketing Managers, for example, their job listings can guide messaging that speaks directly to their goals and day-to-day tasks. 

    5. Industry Forums & Chat Groups: Where the Real Talk Happens 

    Spaces like Reddit threads, Slack groups, and Discord servers are full of organic, unfiltered discussion. Monitoring these spaces gives you: 

    • A window into ongoing challenges, questions, and frustrations 
    • Cues on tone, language, and community norms 
    • A sense of what topics are top of mind for your audience 
    • Unfiltered feedback on opportunities for growth and what matters the most to your audience 

    If your audience includes IT Directors or Marketing Managers, for example, their job listings can guide messaging that speaks directly to their goals and day-to-day tasks. 

    Flip your weaknesses into strengths
    byu/Torholic inmarketing

    These insights can help inform everything from thought leadership to ad copy, so you’re not just heard, you’re understood. 

    6. Surveys: DIY Doesn’t Mean Low Quality 

    Yes, full-scale survey panels can get pricey. But targeted stakeholder surveys (think: past clients, current customers, newsletter audiences) can still deliver high-value insights: 

    • What is the biggest problem they are looking for your product or service to solve? 
    • What pushed them to choose your product or service? 
    • What kind of content do they trust most? 

    Keep it short, focused, and value-driven to get the answers worth acting on. 

    7. CRM Data: What’s Already Working (or not) 

    You probably already have a goldmine of audience data sitting in your CRM that is unique to your exact audience. Take a peek under the hood and dig into: 

    • Identify themes in the types of organizations or job titles buying your solution to better inform campaign targeting 
    • Reveal which campaigns and content are consistently found in the buyer’s journey and should be prioritized in future content initiatives 
    • Identify which prospects may not be converting and decide if they may not be a fit for solution right now  

    Pair this with lead scoring or email engagement rates to learn which segments are moving and which need more nurturing in real-time. 

    8. De-Anonymizing Web Visitors: Turn Intent Into Action 

    There is no better way to identify your target audience than to see who is already organically researching your brand. Platforms like Apollo and Propensity can tell you who’s showing research intent and visiting your website, even before they fill out a form. That means: 

    • You can see which companies are checking you out 
    • Understand what pages they’re engaging with most 
    • Refine your outbound and content strategy accordingly 

    It’s a modern way to bring your audience out of the shadows and into the pipeline. 

    Final Thought: Strategy Over Single Tactics

    Audience insights don’t live in a silo, they fuel every smart, integrated marketing plan. From brand storytelling to media buying, knowing who you’re talking to is the first step in showing up the right way. The right mix of tools and tactics will lead to a smarter approach and allow you to thoughtfully apply findings quickly to your next marketing campaign. 

    Want help building a research-backed, insight-led strategy that actually moves the needle? Let’s talk.

    Melanie Orcutt

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  • 5 Ways to Take Your Email Strategy to the Next Level

    5 Ways to Take Your Email Strategy to the Next Level

    The reality is, most leads aren’t ready to buy the first time they interact with your brand. Buying cycles fluctuate among industries, services and products, which is why lead nurturing is such an essential part of your digital ecosystem. Email marketing is one of the fastest and most cost-effective forms of lead nurturing to date.

    To run an effective email marketing program, it’s important to make sure your organization is utilizing automation to its full potential. Understanding and implementing email best practices can significantly elevate your email strategy and deliver a clear ROI for your business.

    Whether it’s Constant Contact, Hubspot, Pardot or another email marketing system, segmenting and nurturing your leads with email workflows is a huge driver in building relationships and moving leads down the funnel. If you want customers to buy from you, you must stay top of mind by getting in front of them multiple times. 

    Here are the top 5 ways to ensure success: 

    1. Segment Your Audience’s List

    Segmenting your email lists allows you to develop targeted messaging for your audience personas. Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns. Through segmentation, you can achieve high levels of personalization by collecting data on individuals who are interested in your product or service. 

    2. Focus on Personalization 

    In today’s marketing climate, the answer to delivering emails that successfully drive conversions and brand awareness is personalization. Start the email with a first name personalization token and use insights from behavioral or web analytics to customize the content throughout the email. You should also include personalization in the subject line, as it’s proven to increase open rates exponentially.

    Here are three different ways to use web insights and behaviors to segment and personalize your email communications to make your customers feel like you see them as a human and not a number:

    Demographics

    The first way marketers can segment emails is by using demographic data — such as age, gender, company position and income level — to tell you about a contact’s needs and interests. For example, if you’re hosting a local event in Boston and you know a segment of your audience lives in the city, you can target them with a specific email. Gather demographic information and behavior through forms on your website with tools like HubSpot or Mouseflow

    Email Engagement

    Email engagement is another easy way to segment your lists — and it can have a huge impact on your overall email campaigns results. 

    You can create a re-engagement email campaign for inactive users that can include a coupon or discount to get these contacts to re-engage, or you can create an email offering VIP access to products for users who consistently engage with emails. And in most email marketing platforms, you can create lists based on email marketing activity – last email open date, click date, etc.  

    email marketing lists

    Website Behavior

    Keeping track of a visitor’s website behavior is another simple way to get more information about visitor interest. Website behavior is an extremely powerful data set to utilize, and in some platforms, you can easily view a contact’s behavior on your site. 

    track website behavior

    You can trigger targeted email workflows based on a page view or specific form fields submitted by users: 

    • Individuals who visited one page but missed another related page 
    • What videos people watched or what buttons they clicked
    • Content they downloaded 

    3. Add Visuals to Your Emails

    While your emails should be informational, it’s important to provide as much information as you can through visuals — be they graphics, videos, infographics, gifs or images. 

    Most individuals skim through emails, so having visuals that will catch their eye and make them read the content is critical. The examples below show how updating an email with a few images, CTAs and graphics make a big difference in the overall look and feel of the email. 

    text email vs email with visuals

    4. Automate Your Email Campaigns

    Creating quality leads that convert prospects should be the main goal of any email marketing program. Automation helps move leads down the funnel and into various stages of the buying journey in a scalable way. 

    Automated emails help deliver consistent brand messaging at the right time for each individual. Effective automated campaigns help move people from awareness to consideration to the decision stage.  

    Some automated email workflows that work well for B2B and B2C organizations are: 

    • Welcome Workflow: A top-of-funnel workflow used to bring new leads into the funnel who may not be looking at specific products or services. Often triggered by a sign-up form on the homepage or highly trafficked webpage.
    • Abandon Cart Workflows: Used mainly in B2C to remind consumers they left an item in their cart, offering an incentive to purchase. 
    • Post-Purchase Workflow: Builds brand awareness and loyal customers through continuous engagement after users have purchased.

    Amongst these highly effective workflows, there are others — such as post-event, product-specific, industry-specific workflows — that all enable a strong email marketing program. 

    email workflow chart

    5. Test as Much as You Can

    Many email platforms allow you to test various parts of your email to understand which content resonates most with your audience. A/B testing subject lines can help increase open rates, while testing CTA buttons helps you to analyze what language made your readers click through. It’s essential to utilize data to continuously optimize and improve your email campaigns.  

    Ready to level up your email campaigns? Fill out the form below and our email experts will be in touch.

    Kendall Pope

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  • Why Every Marketing Strategy Should Start with an Audit

    Why Every Marketing Strategy Should Start with an Audit

    Before you go to the grocery store, you check your fridge to make sure you don’t wind up with four cartons of eggs – again. When you build a marketing plan for your brand, you’re going to want to conduct an audit. Brand audits are the fridge-checks of marketing. 

    In marketing, audits reveal areas of opportunity, trends in the market, background on an industry, target audience information and unique brand features. The details and insights your brand may uncover during an audit are extremely valuable when it comes to developing your brand and marketing strategy. Similar to taking fridge inventory before shopping, you may review your brand’s Instagram posts to get a sense of the messages, images and brand info that’s been shared to determine if it’s resonating with your target audience, if it’s following best practices and if it’s driving results for KPIs.

    Ultimately, the goal of a brand audit is to provide a holistic view of your marketing operation, analyze your competition and inform a brand and marketing strategy that positions you to reach your goals. 

    Main types of marketing audits:

    An audit can include many things, and the type of audits you execute may vary depending on your brand’s needs or project goals. When beginning any form of an audit, it’s important to conduct one-on-one interviews, focus groups or research studies with both internal subject matter experts at your organization and with your customers. You should ask them questions about your brand and products or services, and try to learn more about their experiences. Additionally, ask them about their pain points, goals and values. Gathering information directly from your customers can help you build buyer persons, plan for messaging and more.  

    Next, you’ll want to conduct various audits of your existing marketing. For our fully integrated clients, we recommend the following types of audits:  

    1. Messaging Audit: Analyze the messages and sentiments in the marketplace about your brand and your products or services. Understanding how your brand is being portrayed will help to identify areas of opportunity, as well as highlight what’s being done successfully. ​ 
    2. Content Audit: Review the content assets being used to drive your marketing objectives. Whether it’s to educate prospects on your solutions or drive leads to convert, this is a crucial step in understanding how to best leverage your current content, and how you can improve new content. All these details will inform your content marketing strategy.
    3. SEO/SEM Audit​: Assess your website’s organic and paid search rank in a search engine to provide insights and optimizations that will improve how your prospects find your brand. Additionally, you’ll be able to understand where you rank for the keywords that are relevant to your industry. An SEO/SEM audit can also provide insights into what your audience is searching for.  
    4. Social Media Audit​: A brand’s social media presence often influences a prospect’s first impression of the brand, meaning it can provide key insights for important optimizations. The audit should include both paid and organic social media to provide a holistic view of how the brand comes across to your customers.  
    5. Email/Marketing Automation Audit​: A lead-nurturing program using email is one of the best tactics to include in your overall marketing strategy to reach your goals. Review your current CRM/MAP to look for areas of opportunity to optimize emails, workflows, lists and your overall marketing automation system that fits in with the larger lead nurture strategy, content promotion plan or customer engagement efforts. 
    6. Website Audit​: This can encompass a variety of exercises, from audits of a website’s messaging and content, to branding and design, to UX and technical audits. This in-depth exercise provides a 360-degree view of how your brand comes to life on one of the most important owned channels: your website.  
    7. Competitive Audit: After you’ve conducted the above audits for your brand, it’s important to  take an in-depth look at your competitors so you know where you stand against them — and how you can stand out in the market. Look at their website, messaging, positioning in the market, content and media channels (organic and paid search and social) to provide insights into how you can improve your presence and representation in each area. This can be as intricate as necessary and should focus on providing insights for the main goals for your marketing strategy.

    To gather the details necessary for a holistic marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals, consider tapping into third-party research tools. These tools can provide the data needed to fully round out your strategy and support the insights gathered for the internal and external interviews and other audit findings.  

    Once you complete your audit, you’ll have a holistic understanding of your position in the market, how best to highlight your unique value propositions to resonate with your buyer personas, clear direction on content and messaging, and so much more. 

    Brand audits are highly strategic and can be a cumbersome project for an in-house team to produce. Audits require a large time commitment, the right third-party tools and the brand strategy experts to conduct stakeholder interviews and research, analyze the marketing efforts, contextualize the data, and produce actionable insights that will help you develop a strong brand and marketing strategy. At Matter, our team of strategists help brands at all stages achieve their goals through these methods. Interested in learning more? Contact us today!  

    Sara Roberts

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  • How Has PR Changed? See Our New Website

    How Has PR Changed? See Our New Website

    I’ve read – and written – plenty of stories and blog posts about how PR is a different gig than it was even 10 years ago. It’s obvious to me because I see what our teams at Matter create, execute and analyze every single day.

    But today I found an interesting visual snapshot of just how far the PR world has come since we first hung our shingle 13 years ago. On Monday we launched a brand new website, which, when compared to our first attempt at a website, looks like it was built by highly advanced aliens from another dimension.

    Our first site was static, flat, doing only one job: letting the world know we existed on the Internet. Nothing fancy. Nothing shareable, memorable or visual. In later iterations our language about communications began to evolve. You can see our site get more visual and social and engaging over time.

    Our new website leads with a dazzling video showcasing a range of highly visual content produced for clients, ranging from high-end videos to animation to broadcast placements to social campaigns. It’s a reflection of work we’ve done, and more of the agency we’ve become. Our work now is truly about building brands – whether through video, creative, social, digital marketing or public relations.

    This broad range of disciplines brings to life this recent quote in PRWeek: “In the survey of about 1,000 agency and in-house comms team leaders, only a quarter agreed that the words ‘public relations’ would accurately describe the profession in five years.”

    PR is the engine of what we do at Matter and that won’t change. It’s everything else we integrate with it that creates the big change. That’s why we are a Brand Elevation Agency.

    Look at our new website. You’ll see.

    Scott Signore

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