Every marketer should strive to create a deeper, more personal connection with their target audience. 

Why should they do this? 

Because if you can develop that deeper connection with your audience, then you become more than just a company to them. You become a brand they can trust. You become a brand they repeatedly visit and make purchases from. You become a brand they refer to their friends and family.

So how do you create that deeper connection?

The first step begins with your marketing efforts. Rather than thinking of your marketing efforts as some wide-ranging outreach, you should consider them as an attempt to speak directly to specific parts of the population. 

After all, you should not try to convey your message to everyone, just your target audience.

Let’s examine how you can do this.

Ask Questions

The first thing you should do to make your efforts more personal is to get curious about your audience. You should aim to learn more about who they are and what their biggest pain points are. Learn about what motivates them and what prevents them from taking action. These are things that you can address in your marketing content that will make it seem like you are speaking directly to them. 

You can learn this information by conducting surveys online or in your place of business. You can also speak to your front line employees or sales staff to see what customers tell them. 

Do Some Research

Next, dig deeper by doing some online research. If you are targeting millennials, then learn about how much money the average millennial makes, what are their spending habits, how many of them are married, have kids, and how many kids.  Do the same if you are targeting middle-aged married couples or retirees in their seventies. 

All of this might sound like a lot of work, but finding this data is not hard as there are many studies done annually of people of ages. As a marketer you want to learn as much as you can so you can craft a better and more complete message to your audience. 

Create Customer Personas

After you have a good idea of who your target audience is, go a step further and create a customer persona that reflects your ideal customer/client. 

Creating a customer persona allows you to go deeper because you are not speaking to a vague set of unknown people, but rather a defined person that you have given a name, title, gender, and age. This persona becomes the avatar for the group of people that you are trying to attract. 

Create and Publish Valuable Content

Now that you have created a customer persona, you can use it to create more personalized content that is more likely to get your audience to take action. Because you have taken time to understand who you are speaking to, what their needs are, and how to get to them to take action, your marketing content will be much more effective.

It will also be more valuable to your target audience because you are speaking directly to their needs. They will begin to see you as a trusted resource and may even begin to refer their friends and family to your content. 

Make It A Positive Experience

Above all, you should make the marketing and purchasing experience a positive one. If a customer has a bad experience making the actual purchase, then all your hard marketing work might go to waste. 

Look to make the checkout process, whether it be online or in person, as smooth as possible. Then, if you collected their email or phone number, send a message to follow up to see if they are satisfied. And if they are not for any reason, do what you can to fix the situation. In the end, you want to leave the customer happy and feeling good about your business. 

Creating a deeper connection with your customers may sound like a lot of work, but it is worth it when you consider that you are not looking for one-time buyers. You are looking for a loyal customer base that will not only make multiple purchases, but will also tell their friends and family about you. That is worth all the effort.