As a marketing agency, especially one with a strong focus on one specific industry, we understand the difficulties of breaking into new verticals and targeting a new group of potential clients. As an advertising agency, we experience the same pressures that many of our clients deal with when branching out into a new vertical or when trying to go after a new group of potential clients. So, let our growing pains, and over 20 years of experience in helping our clients, shed some light on these common issues many of you might also be facing.
I work closely with our sales and upper management team, and we identified some unique ways to address how to identify which marketing channels are most effective and how to capture the attention of those key decision-makers in our new verticals!
Let’s start by reviewing what is “vertical or persona marketing?”. And no, it has nothing to do with elevation.
This is a marketing strategy focusing on understanding the channels and creating content that your targeting customer base utilizes. Understanding which channels and the types of creative materials your target customer prefers allows you to maximize your resources as there is no one size fits all marketing strategy for vertical and target populations, this allows for a more custom messaging to each segment and ensures the information provided is helpful, applicable, and most importantly seen.
The first and most important step to successfully breaking into new verticals is to understand your buyer’s persona by effectively segmenting your audience. A buyer persona is a full and detailed profile of someone who looks like your target client. This includes understanding their demographic information (sex, age, occupation, educational background, etc.), the media they use (social media channels, news networks, magazines, blogs, etc.), and how they like to receive their information (blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, display advertising, direct mail, etc). Identifying your target buyer persona and then how to create and send your message will help your marketing efforts be the most effective and allows you to make small and quick changes to further improve your marketing efforts. We use our buyer persona guide with our clients and our internal team to help guide our marketing efforts. To receive our free buyer persona template please email our Client Success Team!
Once we understand the buyer persona, we then determine what strategies and creative types we will use in to help our clients reach their campaign objectives. Let’s examine two of our current clients’ campaigns to better explain:
• Our automotive dealerships, Diamond CDJR; their primary goal for our advertising is to drive qualified in-person showroom visits over a long weekend sales event.
• Our e-commerce beauty brand, Sparkling Beauty; their primary goal for our advertising is to reach new audiences and increase their website traffic time on their site.
See how different these goals and their target buyer personas may be? We suggest very different marketing tactics and creative message options based on these short goal summaries. For our auto client, we would focus on targeting based on income, credit scores, and the vehicles they already own, and layering on in-market shoppers which focus on the potential consumers’ online and offline behavior utilizing social media, display advertising, and direct mail. For our beauty clients, we focus on interest and keyword targeting focusing on video advertising on popular social media and video content sites.
But how does that apply to the same product but different verticals and buyer personas? Here is how Diamond Media Solutions finds new clients in multiple verticals based on our target buyer persona.
• CBD and Marijuana: Email marketing, Linkedin, Streaming podcasts, sponsored ads, and case studies
• Automotive: Referrals, Facebook, Streaming podcasts, case studies, and video content
Splitting our messaging into multiple sources and creative styles helps potential customers how we, and our clients, can help them, not just generally but specifically how we can support their goals.
This is not just a problem for agencies, but every company feels the difficulty of reaching their target markets. So even though a consumer-facing company would have a well-defined customer base, to grow their business, they will need to expand into new groups of people. Building out the buyer persona of these new consumer groups applies to B2C and B2B companies. To receive a free buyer persona template please email our Client Success Team!
Further reading:
https://blog.marketo.com/2017/02/5-steps-to-market-to-a-new-vertical.html
https://velocitypartners.com/blog/vertical-marketing-strategy-in-b2b-when-why-how/
https://pomagency.com/pro-tips-new-vertical-markets/?cn-reloaded=1
Brianna Kennedy is a Senior Account Manager for Diamond Media Solutions.
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