Marketing Rocket Science
Targeting is all about landing your marketing message exactly where you intended to go, even if it’s from hundreds of miles away. If you hit the bulls-eye, you’ve delivered the right message to the right person at the right time, and you’ll probably land a sale. It’s the marketing equivalent of Space X’s recent landing of a rocket on a barge floating at sea. Pretty impressive huh?
We’ll tell you right now, Space X didn’t just do that on a whim. It took a thoughtful approach and some fairly serious planning, and before that planning was complete there was some fairly expensive trial and error. The same goes for you, only with careful planning, you can avoid the costly mistakes that don’t bring in the right customers. If you want your direct mail postcards to land on all the right barges, as it were, you’re going to need to look at the data. Get it right, and you’ve injected rocket-fuel into your ROI.
Here is the data you’ll want to consider when targeting your postcard marketing:
• Who they are? Let’s look at your demographics. This is the first step you’ll want to take in narrowing down your audience by age, gender, marital status, economic status, level of education, income level, and employment. This will help you cut down the entire market of potential buyers to more manageable segment to whom you can address a more personalized message. If you select only women, for example, you can use all-feminine pronouns throughout your postcards. If you’re not sure where to start, try to come up with your most “typical” customer and filter based on that.
• What do they value? These are what are called psychographics factors. Whereas demographics are more about someone’s physical state, psychographics delve into their belief systems, their values, and take into account preferences like hobbies, interests, and dislikes. You’ll want to factor this part heavily into how you phrase your messages so that you’re speaking in your audiences’ language. Avoid controversy by erring on the side of respecting all beliefs equally in your marketing.
• How they act? Behavioral segmentation is about whether people are likely to respond to your marketing or not. Luckily for direct mail, it has broad acceptance among all demographics, but what sorts of calls to action are people likely to respond best to? People in large cities are more likely to prefer a website they can visit while folks from the Midwest typically appreciate talking to someone on the phone. And if you’re using QR codes, make sure that it’s with a younger demographic.
• Where they live? Values, neighborhood, and weather all play a big part in people’s responsiveness to marketing. Travel offers featuring bright and sunny beaches are all the brighter when sent to cold places at cold times. Or if a community is particularly proud of its civic engagement, remember to list your local affiliations like the chamber of commerce or Rotary on your postcard.
• Past business relationship? This is of course key: have they bought from you before? If you’re in doubt, be sure to use ambiguous language that doesn’t presume that they don’t know you, as this may hurt the brand familiarity that you’ve already built up. If you know for certain that you’re targeting customers, talk to them like old friends.
Great, that’s a mountain of data. How can you quickly and easily sort through all of this to get your postcards to the right people?
Using our web-to-print platform, target your ideal customer personas at the click of a button. Simply choose to between these four options:
• Map My Mail: Draw an area on Google Maps using tax assessor data.
• Demographic Search: Choose from hundreds of data choices and in-depth property information.
• Psychographic Search (Powered by Nielsen PRIZM): Understand your customer at a deeper level by choosing pre-selected personas who match your ideal customer.
• Upload your own list!
Once you’ve got your list and you’ve designed your mailing, it’s blast-off for your marketing campaign.