Are you marketing to your audience's life milestones?
Back to school, graduation, getting married, becoming an adult, birthdays, buying a house, getting your first job… You get it – there are a lot of milestones we hit in life that are marked with excitement, fear, insecurity, hope, and many other emotions. While certain milestones are hit at specific times in the year (ie. Back to school), you can bet that every day someone is going through a life-changing milestone in their life, whether large or small.
Do you know your audience well enough to market to them during those milestones? If you’re not sure, here are a two key ways to get to know what’s important to your audience/customers.
Ask. Sometimes the simplest answer is the best one. If you have a current database of customers, send them a survey with a few strategic questions. If you don’t have a large database of customers, reach out via social media using tools like Twitter polls and Facebook ads as well as posting a link to your survey. Ask questions like:
When was the last time you celebrated something? What was it?
Is there anything you are looking forward to?
How do you celebrate reaching a goal?
What does success mean to you?
Listen. Whether you have asked a question or not, people are already talking. Get on social media and follow relevant hashtags in your industry and see what people are talking about.
Look within. It sounds really deep, but we’re talking about business launch anniversaries, new hires, office openings, and even the holidays that are important to your team.
Once you know what’s important to your audience you need to decide how it fits within your overall strategy. (Ie. It won’t make sense for everyone to market to newlywed couples!) After picking your focal milestones (best to look at this annually to start out with and tweak along the way), here is how you can make the most of these milestones in your marketing strategy.
Define the audience connection
This is the “so what?” of your efforts. You need to be able to make a connection with your audience using their important milestones as a vehicle. That connection has to be clear otherwise you will miss out on the opportunity.
It’s your job to connect with your audience in a meaningful way on their terms. You need to make sure you are making use of the marketing channels that they are engaged with. Communicate your “so what?” in a tone of voice and language that makes sense to them.
Plan ahead for marketing to milestones
Planning in advance means you aren’t scrambling to get things done last minute – which is a sure way to forget certain details that would make your campaign a true success. If you are planning for a major company milestone, you might start planning ahead 3 – 5 years depending on the scope of the campaign. It can take a lot of coordination to get budgets and suppliers in line if you are doing multiple events throughout the year as part of the celebration. If you are planning for a shorter campaign, think about planning anywhere from 1 year to two months in advance.
This will give you time to make sure your “so what?” will make a big enough splash with your audience and with the media.
It’s about them, but it’s really about you
Yes, you are using a milestone to appeal to your audience, but you need to make sure that you are tapping into your already established brand identity. Use this as an opportunity to evolve your brand further and to create an even deeper connection with your audience. It always comes down to making sure you are getting the right brand messages across to your audience.