Across the digital landscape, brands have a robust toolkit of platforms, services and pipelines for reaching their ideal customer. At the same time, customers are consuming content on just as many platforms and are bombarded with up to 5,000 ads daily.
With the considerable clutter in digital marketing, how can you ensure you’re reaching your customers? More importantly, how can you be certain you’re optimizing your reach to capture as many viable customers as possible—whether loyal, occasional or new to your brand? Here are five ways to optimize customer reach for your business.
Know who you’re trying to reach
It used to be challenging to determine if your advertising was reaching the right people, but currently it’s arguably easier to reach exactly who you want due to the availability of customer data. To do so, it’s important to understand your overall business objectives and which customers will help you drive results.
In digital marketing, brands often use a mix of first- and third-party data. With this information, brands can reduce advertising waste by targeting those customers who matter most to them based on specific targetable attributes, such as adults 25-40 who have shopped your brand in the last 30 days and are known purchasers of organic products.
Know how and where customers consume content
It’s one thing to know who your customers are, but it’s a slam dunk to know where they spend most of their time consuming content. One can quickly infer that everyone consumes content on major platforms such as Meta, TikTok and YouTube. However, the important thing to know is how your customers interact with these platforms.
Once you’ve identified these pieces, the next step is to develop authentic creative native to the platforms, with messaging targeted to your specific customer set. This will ensure your ads reach the right people at the right time in the right spaces.
Have a comprehensive marketing channel mix
Once you’ve identified your customers and where they are consuming content, the next step is to develop a channel mix that encompasses all potential entry points for your messages.
First, start with your main business objectives and associated KPIs, because not all campaigns have the same media channel mix. What often works well for improving customer reach is first thinking about the overall customer journey and where you think you can make the most impact. For example, video and audio channels, such as YouTube, Spotify, etc., are great at driving awareness and building your customer funnel that you can later retarget with lower-funnel channels such as display, social or paid search.
Be agile and prepare for customer, industry and economic shifts
While it’s important to have a comprehensive marketing strategy for reaching customers, your approach should also flex if there are noticeable shifts in customer behavior. For example, at the height of the pandemic, most brands were flooded with new customers and record sales. The challenge most marketers faced was how to continue to engage and retain those new customers and convert them to loyal shoppers.
Strategies during this time focused largely on driving new customer acquisition and then retention. This was short-lived, as within the last two years, the economy faced inflation and shrinkage in many industries. As such, behaviors have shifted again, prompting many companies to focus more on retaining their loyal customers as opposed to attracting new ones. Regardless of where your strategy currently sits, you can still ensure that you optimize your customer reach by leveraging the above points and keeping a pulse on your ongoing performance.
Get comfortable with analytics
A critical part of your strategy will be what is being measured and how. Tracking your performance across marketing channels, customer segments and overall business goals will provide you with the insights to make optimizations critical to the ongoing success of your campaigns. Your measurement cadence should also be determined by your overall business needs.
Some brands focus on weekly performance readouts while others concentrate more on long-tail measurements, such as monthly or quarterly, and some do a mix of all views. Whatever the cadence, ensure you have the measurement stack to capture all the data across your various marketing touchpoints.
Finally, stay curious about your customers. Over time, customers’ behaviors shift, and marketers must continue to acknowledge and adjust the strategies to meet the needs of those who shop their brands time and time again.
