Forget about the name-dropping self-promotion that is many companies’  go-to strategy for everything from sales to SEO to marketing.  Desperately shoving your company’s name into the conversation at any given opportunity actually dilutes your reputation and feels forced.  Rather than frightening potential customers by going on the offensive in your full throttle approach to getting your brand out there, take a step back and meet your customers where they are.  By identifying where your potential customers already are at, you can establish common ground: a much better place to build a relationship and drive conversions than shoving yourself in their face.  In marketing the term for your community of potential customers who already have a vested interest in your product is “target audience”.  Here are some steps to begin locating your target audience on their home turf.

  • The immediate approach to sales and marketing may be “to reach everyone” and then narrow down from there.  At the cloud computing company  I worked with, we immediately narrowed our  outreach to people who were already using our product.  Refining our search this way allowed for us to organically build out from a base of existing customers instead of trying to randomly find a marketing segment in an impossibly large pool of everyone ever.  Our weapon of choice?  Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is a free tool that can be leveraged to find data on unique visitors to your website.  Defining our top visitors gave us a sense of who to reach out to for user feedback and case studies: phase 2.
  • Themes. We then launched a campaign to reach out to our existing users via Skype calls. Rather than creating customer personas, we were able to directly get a sense of who our customers were, what problems they were trying to solve, and how they felt about our product.  Not only were we able to leverage these discussions for case studies, but by participating in these conversations, I as a marketing professional was able to spot emerging themes in what types of communities, technological habits, and conversations  they were a part of.
  • Social Media: The next step was to connect with these users on social media.  Through this outlet, I was able to gain a better sense of what communities these people were a part of.  As it turned out, most of our customers were indie game developers using our product in conjunction with google app engine to create their products in Java.  I observed that Google Plus at the time was leading the conversation about Google App Engine (naturally) so focused on the community there as one target audience.  Meanwhile, another target audience of enterprise Java developers was converging on Twitter so that became a hub of strategic focus as well.
  • Influencers: Next, it was important to identify who the biggest existing influencers in these communities were and build relationships with them by re-tweeting them and including them in links to valuable news and web resources.  Buzzsumo is a great intuitive tool for tracking Twitter influencers.
  • Listening: Social media is so rapid fire it often creates a false sense of urgency.  Yet by taking a step back to listen in on conversations, note key players and themes, it is easier to form a relevant strategy for participating so that when you have something to say it is a powerful tool in building your reputation instead of weak puffs of air.
  • Participating: One thing we did really well was position ourselves as a thought leader in the cloud computing space.  We did this by targeting app developers and enterprise Java users in their home turf, observing their conversations, and then adding value to them by creating content and social media that challenging and engaging.  (Hootsuite is a great tool for scheduling timely social media posts and following the conversation).

Of course building organic relationships with your target audience rather than going on a random name dropping spree may seem more time consuming at first.  Yet ultimately, it will save you time, energy, and resources by focusing your energy on bigger impact outreach rather than an endless game of hit or miss.  My challenge to you is: when it comes to your users are you going to attack or engage?