The delicate balance of target marketing and lead generation is deciding just how specific or broad your contacts should be. This is what sets telemarketing apart as a marketing strategy.
Prospecting is the act of seeking out contacts that already displayed interest in your brand and services. Lead generation is when those prospects have been narrowed down on a series of specific details, such as:
- Job title
- Decision making
- Budget
- Pain points
- Timeline
This brings in the conundrum of many businesses today: should your leads be more specific or more generalized? As it stands, both can be highly useful in your endeavors.
Table of Contents
Understanding Target Marketing
Being a one-size-fits-all solution isn’t a great idea. After all, target markets have unique needs, meaning they’ll need unique services.
Target marketing is separated into a few segments. These include:
- Mainstream market
- Target marketing
- Local marketing
- Niche marketing
- Micro markets
For example, targeting a head executive with a highly specialized role will benefit more from a direct, one-on-one marketing approach. Telemarketing stands apart as a more personalized service that cuts to the root of your lead’s pain points. If you were more generalized, your lead head executive could view you as generalized and unequipped to solve their problems.
That said, broad lead generation is useful if you deeply understand your target audience and have a message you know will resonate with them. This is easier to do when they share a common industry issue that they all have the power to influence. In this instance, narrowing down your audience too much can have you missing out on massive lead generation numbers.
How to Research Your Target Market
Researching your target market is easy once you break down the process into basic steps. What kind of information do you need to help your leads solve their business conundrums?
Basic information you should have when researching includes:
- Demographic information
- Geographic information
- Financial information
- Behavioral information
- More specific details like interests, hobbies, or business concerns
Related: Supporting E-Commerce Customer Experiences
The Best Lead Generation Channels for Target Marketing
Telemarketing
When you consider what communication channels to use as part of your marketing strategy, remember that telemarketing as a distribution channel is positioned ideally for making contact with every decision-maker and influencer in your target audience.
Telemarketing provides unparalleled results in identifying and reaching the decision-makers and influencers and producing qualified actionable leads that convert to measurable growth for your company.
How does telemarketing provide such a high rate of lead generation? Through personal contact. By creating the setting for a highly-personalized, one-on-one conversation through telemarketing, you receive immediate feedback from your contact at an organization, learning their role in the decision-making team and what stage the organization is in with deciding whether to invest in a solution.
Unlike other forms of distribution, in which the conversation is largely one-sided and generalized, telemarketing gives you the opportunity to hear your potential buyer’s concerns and reservations and get a feel for where they are in the buying cycle.
Telemarketing is also a very cost-effective way to reach your target audience and obtain qualified leads.
Content Syndication
You may not realize the disservice you do to your growth plan when you limit your contact goals to ONLY those you perceive as the ultimate decision-makers in the organizations you are targeting. The effort to make a connection with a single decision-maker may cause you to lose future opportunities or risk engaging with an organization the wrong way.
When it comes to important investments, it is critical you do not allocate decision-making to a single individual. Increasingly, companies are taking a collaborative approach to make decisions about an investment. When a big allocation of resources is involved, companies see value in achieving buy-in across a number of key stakeholders, in addition to a variety of influencers in the organization.
As a potential provider of a product or service to the company, you must deliver high-quality, educational content to decision-makers and influencers across the organization. Companies are investing their resources to research solutions for their business challenges. If you miss the opportunity to deliver consistent and valuable content to each person involved in a purchasing decision, you run the risk of being irrelevant in the process, or of not being included in the final decision.
You also need to use an expanded approach in order to capture more interest and attention to your content. It’s critical to design and follows a clearly-defined strategy to communicate your brand story and business solution to your target audience. Your first priority should be developing your reputation as a go-to source for reliable and valuable information in your target audience’s industry.
Influencers
Lead generation is key for any business that wants to stay scaled and maintain a consistent cash flow. Unlike prospecting, lead generation is ensuring your visitors have an acute interest in your industry.
Recent statistics have found influencer marketing to be one of the fastest-growing segments of digital marketing, raking in nearly $14 billion in 2021. What makes influencer marketing so powerful is its ability to tap into more personalized messaging that traditional marketing tactics sometimes miss. Since buyers today have more information than ever before investing in a brand, harnessing influencer marketing is essential for success.
Influencer marketing is commonly conflated with B2C marketing. While it’s a great resource for communicating directly with consumers, influencers can also be harnessed for B2B purposes. Understanding your target audience and their pain points will steer you toward better business decisions where everyone wins.
Related: 7 Stats Changing the Customer Service Experience
The Narrowing Effect
Target Marketing is commonly employed to distribute white papers, case studies, and webinars (among other types of content) to clients and prospective clients.
The original purpose of Content Marketing was to not only generate leads but also to boost brand recognition. It was used to deliver content to a broad range of decision-makers and influencers across a spectrum of industries and sizes. Furthermore, companies invested in content in an effort to be considered industry experts.
In the past year, it has become apparent that companies are narrowing their target audiences for content marketing. The trend is evolving to primarily focus target marketing on reaching those with high-level titles in an organization, including directors and executive vice presidents. The current focus of content syndication also tends to concentrate attention on specific company types and sizes.
The result of these changes is that the number of targeted potential contacts has decreased dramatically, with the number of contacts involved in a marketing strategy reduced from tens of thousands to a few thousand on a single project.
The unintended consequence is a variety of challenges that stand in the way of marketing success. The most important challenge is the reduction in potential contacts without a corresponding reduction in the number of leads expected to be generated on a monthly plan. In addition, many companies believe they can create these higher-level leads without an adjustment to their budgets.
The changes to the approach for target marketing have some unintended consequences, with unique challenges:
The number of leads desired has remained consistent. While it may be reasonable to generate several hundreds of leads per month when the target list includes tens of thousands of individuals, it is unlikely to generate as many leads per month when only a few thousand individuals are being contacted. You must recognize that the total number of leads is expected to be smaller when targeting only the highest executives at a company.
The budget for content syndication has remained the same. The cost of generating leads when targeting a broader list of potential decision-makers is lower than the cost of generating leads when targeting only high-level executives. You must recognize that higher funds, or higher cost per lead, are necessary to convert the executive branch to a qualified lead.
Don’t Narrow Your Target Marketing – Let Blue Valley Help
Don’t make the mistake of narrowing your target audience so much that your brand becomes irrelevant. Instead, tap into the power of telemarketing as a part of your comprehensive marketing strategy to build your presence as a trusted business partner with valuable resources for your target audience.
When you implement telemarketing it works in conjunction with your social media and content marketing to build a solid reputation among all the stakeholders and influencers involved in the decision.To learn more about how telemarketing helps you capture the attention of your target audience as part of a strategic marketing plan, contact the specialists at Blue Valley Telemarketing.
Last Updated on September 14, 2023 by Ronen Ben-Dror