One of the greatest challenges when developing a marketing plan is understanding where to find, reach and engage with your customer.
In today’s society, people are time poor, including you, me and of course, our customers, so needing to reach them at a time and place that is suitable to them as well as one that will drive an impact for your message is pivotal to your marketing plans success.
Understanding your customer and their common behaviour is a great starting point in being able to identify where and how to reach them.
There is a little mantra that is used in marketing circles which is “reaching the right customer, with the right message, at the right time, through the right channel” and it’s really important to your marketing activity that you work through this before buying or developing any marketing. We can break it down fairly simply:
- The right customer: that’s your target audience
- The right message: that is the message that you want them to take away from your marketing, one which must be relevant to them.
- The right time: this is the time that is right for the customer which is considered down to an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly view.
- The right channel: this is the channel that is right for your customer and your message. Some messages work better in particular channels so once you understand what your message take out is, you can work out the best way to deliver it and when.
The clincher for all of this is understanding where to reach your customer and influence them, as part of their daily routines. By involving yourself in their routine, you will have a greater opportunity in reaching them and them receiving your message.
If you think about your daily patterns, customers have the same certain habits that they like and these are what you need to rely upon to reach your audience. Breaking down those habits by customer does require some assumptions to be built but you need a starting point to build a common ground for your target market, and then validate them before execution. A common way you can work through getting to know your customers behaviours a bit more is by building a customer diary.
To build a diary, we need to start with understanding our target audience. Let’s consider a simple target audience to begin with: Females aged 24-32.
We now need to think about putting ourselves in the space of this audience and work through where we might find them and how.
Start with a working week: aged 24-32 would probably mean that they are working and for the sake of our exercise we are going to assume full time, as we want to target individuals with a disposable income. So let’s build an assumed daily activity plan for these individuals:
| Time | Activity | Media Exposure |
| 7am | Wake | Check phone and social media |
| 8am | Gym | Drive to gym – radio |
| 9am | Travel to work | Social media / outdoor |
| Work | Internet / email | |
| Lunch | Social media / outdoor | |
| Work | Internet / email | |
| 5pm | Travel home | Social media / outdoor |
| 6pm | Evening | Dinner / television / social media |
These are some very broad statements but based on some assumptions, such as they are using public transport for travel to work, we can see that these individuals media intake is predominantly social channels. You could then see from here that, if these are the types of customers you are targeting, social marketing is going to be integral for your plan.
It’s worthwhile that you consider building a diary to include their activities outside of the working week so that you can get a clear understanding of what media would need to feature in your marketing.
You would benefit from preparing this type of activity for all of your target audiences. So that you can see how different things can be, let’s skip a few generations ahead and build a diary for Females 64-75.
| Time | Activity | Media Exposure |
| 7am | Wake | Watch morning news / local newspaper |
| 8am | Daily exercise | Walking locally |
| 9am | Housework | Local radio |
| Morning tea | Local radio / morning news | |
| Lunch | Local radio / talk shows | |
| Afternoon tea | Television shows | |
| 5pm | Prepare dinner | Evening news |
| 6pm | Evening | Television / reading / family phone calls |
As you can see, the media intake is vastly different by generation. Once you’ve built the plans, it is best for you to validate them with family, friends, customers and even through using google searches. It’s amazing what information you can find on the internet 🙂 What you do have to consider is that the activity plan you build is not going to be 100% perfect – your target audience will be made up of many different personalities and likes and dislikes which will drive an individuals own daily routine and message absorption. What you are aiming for is the most common elements that allow you to build a best practice approach. You are going to come across a tech savvy Grandma whose media intake is that of our 24 year old females and vice versa. No matter how hard you try, reaching 100% of your target audience is not going to be possible but by reaching the majority and influencing them, you can then rely on other channels such as traditional word of mouth and friend influencers to help drive the other results.
What I have represented here is very high level. For some audiences and activity, I would recommend that you spend quite a bit of time researching and really breaking down their behaviours, media intake as well as detailing external influences that could control some of their activities. You need to develop an understanding of all factors that may jeopardise or strengthen your marketing activity. If you are working within a space where there are already some mature well established businesses, follow and learn from them. Watch what they are doing and try and build on your plan from there. Always consider things like “I like this because…; I’m influenced by this because…; I would respond to this because…’. Knowing what drives your customers purchase behaviour and how they best absorb messages will mean success for you.
I will cover off in a future blog how influencers are now driving a large volume of message and purchase influence through social and online channels as that is going to have a large part to play in how future generations select to purchase or absorb information.
Put yourself in your customers shoes and start building a plan of where to find your them and communicate with them. It will certainly prove worthwhile once you go to build you marketing and channel plan. Getting rid of any wasted media will ensure that you are spending your time, resources and efforts in places that will drive return.
Thanks for reading.
Good Luck!
The Marketing Elf
September 2017
The Marketing Elf 