Alex Koby
Digital marketing for home services has changed tremendously in the last decade. Companies must compete online with specific targeting tactics to become the go-to service in their community. In a perfect world, your target customers would find you easily. Anyone would want your products or services because they’re so amazing. While we’re sure they are, the real world doesn’t work that way. People have preferences and needs, and not every company will be able to serve every person. That’s okay, because that means you have a ready-made audience just waiting to hear how you can improve their lives.
The problem is, how do you find them? How do you make sure that your advertising dollars are helping you reach the right people?
There’s a difference between a typical buyer and your ideal customer. And even if you identify your typical buyers as, say, homeowners in their 30s and 40s, do you understand the specific needs and desires that exist within that group?
Defining your target market means you can focus your efforts on reaching them where they’re most likely to be. And it means you can tailor content and messaging specifically to certain groups, making them much more likely to connect with you. Unsure where to begin? We’ll help you discover your target markets, learn how market segmentation can help your company, and understand how to best nurture these specific audience groups once you find them.
Defining Your Target Market
If you’re a savvy business owner (and we assume you are), you probably have a good idea of what your typical customer is like. But without a formal process for outlining this, the waters can get muddied fairly quickly. You could end up forgetting about an entire audience segment that would be interested in what you have to offer and losing those potential sales.
In fact, knowing your customers is crucial not just for marketing but also for refining your product and service offerings and making adjustments to your processes based on customer needs.
This can be avoided if you create buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. According to HubSpot, they are developed based on market research as well as insights you gather from your customer base, such as interviews and surveys. There are lots of questions you can ask to get good answers that will give you the information you need, but perhaps the most important one is why? Sometimes people can have difficulty analyzing their own behavior, but asking them to explore their reasons for doing something will often get you close to the truth.
What is Market Segmentation—and How Can It Help You?
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Market segmentation goes hand-in-hand with your buyer personas. Defining your buyer personas allows you to engage in market segmentation, which is the process of categorizing your buyers into groups and developing a targeted marketing plan that will speak to their specific needs. Segmentation can be demographic, geographic, psychographic, and more. Much of it will be determined by the work you did when configuring your buyer personas.
Tailoring your marketing to deliver specific messages to designated groups means your messaging will be more likely to resonate with its audience. In fact, marketers who’ve segmented their campaigns have seen a 760% increase in email revenue because of it.
Digital marketing allows for better segmentation, as you can target your ads based on a variety of characteristics. Creating email lists or running Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook ads are all great options.
Tailoring Your Messaging
Documenting your buyer personas and then categorizing them into segments lays the foundation for marketing success. But the process isn’t complete until you develop a plan for reaching each of them. How do you decide what to say? Remember, tailoring your messaging is all about creating a personal connection. It involves identifying your customers’ needs and letting them know how you can solve them. So you will want to focus on things like word choice, imagery, and method of delivery.
Let’s say you’re a home cleaning company and you’ve identified two main buyer personas: Working Mom Wendy and Jetsetting Jen. Both want their homes cleaned, but they have different reasons why. Working Mom Wendy is a busy mom of three who commutes to her job downtown. Weekday evenings are for making dinner, helping with homework, and facilitating bedtime. Weekends are dedicated to errands and family time. In contrast, Jetsetting Jen is retired. She’s worked hard and seen a measure of success that has allowed her to retire comfortably. She prefers to spend time traveling and volunteering and using her disposable income to help her keep a clean house.
Your marketing messages would differ for these two. For Working Mom Wendy, you might say something like:
Spend Your Weekends Relaxing, Not Cleaning
While a message for Jetsetting Jen might say something like:
Let Us Do the Dirty Work
The messages are very similar, and they have the same goals, but they’re written to catch the eyes of different intended audiences.
Developing buyer personas so you can better speak to your customers will help your marketing be more effective in the long run and ensure that your money and time are well spent. Need help? We are experts at digital marketing for home services. Let us target your buyer personas and help you get more business.
