Fashion Digital Marketing: Audience Targeting and Customer Journey Mapping

Audience Targeting

domenica 7 luglio 2024 FASHION DIGITAL MARKETING LEZIONE 4 - 5 AUDIENCE TARGETING

Targeting is the process of identifying a subset of an audience that you want to focus on.

The first step in outlining your strategy for targeting is to identify your primary and secondary audiences.

A primary audience is the most important group of people you are trying to reach. This audience should be obvious and natural for the brand.

The next category is your secondary audiences, the people that you suspect could be purchasers of your product or service, but who fall outside the primary audience.

Getting Down with Data

Thanks to the nature of marketing, access to demographic and psychographic data for target audiences is available and attainable for marketers at every level of budget.

With a mounds of data available on the demographics and generational trends for digital channels, diving deep into how our target audience align with social channel demographics, for example, is essential and very informative for your strategy.

The Art of Personas

A common strategy for shaping your targeting plan is the development of customer personas.

Personas are representations of the members of your target audience.

Personas can be used to broaden our understanding of that audience, allow us to project the needs and behavior of people we don't have data on, and help us design content that caters to their specific needs.

To create your personas, you will want to answer the following questions:

1. - What do they want? · - What products or service are you selling them? . - What will attract them to your brand? · - What words or language do you need to use?

Psychographics are often defined as "a person's characteristic patterns of emotions, social attitudes, values, opinions, lifestyle interests."

Using personas and psychographic data becomes an equally important tool when developing the content that will resonate with those individuals.

Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It's based on market research, actual data about your existing customers, and a few assumptions.

It helps you to understand and relate to an audience that you want to market your products and services.

Buyer personas are one of the most (if not the most) important parts of any marketing strategy.

By analysing trends, behaviours, similarities and patterns amongst your target audience, you can then create a marketing and sales strategy built around their objectives, day-to-day challenges and 'pain points.

buyer personas inform you of what your business should be doing to help potential customers. Without buyer personas, we wouldn't know what content to create, which material to share, how we should direct our marketing efforts or where we can improve our presence. They are the context of the narrative, the framework which houses our efforts. They are the compass that determines the direction of our journey and where we should be going.

Buyer personas require time, patience, strategy and an inquisitive mind. In order to construct the theoretical framework which is your 'ideal' buyer persona, you need 2to question yourself and your business to define just who would be interested in what you have to offer.

Empathy Map

At the heart of user experience (UX) design is empathy. As a UX designer, you are the biggest advocate the user has in ensuring an enjoyable, stress-free product.

In order to be an effective advocate, a designer must be able to understand their user, how they think, what they need, and how they feel.

Empathy maps are an excellent starting point for developing this understanding of your users.

What Does an Empathy Map Look Like?

Essentially, an empathy map is a square divided into four quadrants with the user or client in the middle. Each of the four quadrants comprises a category that helps us delve into the mind of the user. The four empathy map quadrants look at what the user says, thinks, feels, and does.

With the user at the center and the categories in each of the four surrounding quadrants, an empathy map arranges all of your research about the user into an easy-to-read visual. Let's take a closer look at the four quadrants and how they can capture an accurate image of the user.

Says

This section contains direct quotes from the user that have been gathered from the research phase or previous data. It might feature statements like "I need something fast," or "I'm not sure where to go from here."

Thinks

While this quadrant may have similar content to the "Says" section, it is more focused on what a user is thinking and doesn't choose to say out loud. Use your qualitative research to ask what matters to the user and what is on their mind. Looking at why they might be hesitant to share their thoughts out loud can reveal even further insight into the user and how they relate to the product or experience at hand. Example: "This is boring," or "Am I doing this right?"

Feels

This category addresses the user's emotional state and answers questions like "What is the user feeling during this product experience?" and "What worries or 3excites the user?" An easy way to organize this information is to list the emotions being elicited followed by a short description of what is making the user feel this way. For example; "Overwhelmed-too many decisions to make," or, "Anxious- doesn't want to waste their time."

Does

This quadrant capture what the user physically does and how they do it. In other words, what actions does the user take and how do they take them?

Why Use Empathy Maps?

We use empathy maps because they help us understand our user's needs and goals in a more nuanced, but organized way.

Empathy maps can also be used to collect data directly from the users.

Social Listening

Social listening refers to the process of monitoring and analyzing online conversations, discussions, and mentions related to a particular brand, product, topic, or industry.

It involves tracking and analyzing social media platforms, forums, blogs, news sites, and other online sources to gain insights into public opinions, trends, and sentiment.

Social listening involves the use of specialized tools and technologies to collect and analyze vast amounts of social data.

These tools scan social media platforms and other online sources for specific keywords, hashtags, mentions, and relevant discussions. The collected data is then analyzed to extract meaningful insights and trends.

The key objectives of social listening are to understand the overall sentiment surrounding a brand or topic, identify emerging trends and patterns, monitor customer feedback and opinions, track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and gather competitive intelligence.

By leveraging social listening, businesses can gain valuable insights into consumer preferences, needs, and pain points.

This information can be used to: 4

• improve products and services
• enhance customer experiences
• identify potential issues or crises
• and inform marketing and communication strategies.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is tracking social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand, then analyzing them for insights to discover opportunities to act.

It's a two-step process:

Step 1: Monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business.

Step 2: Analyze the information for ways to put what you learn into action. That can be something as small as responding to a happy customer or something as big as shifting your entire brand positioning.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is a technique used by businesses to visualize and understand the experiences and interactions that customers have with their brand across various touchpoints and channels.

It involves creating a visual representation or diagram of the customer's journey from the initial point of engagement to the final goal or outcome.

What Are Customer Journey Maps?

A customer journey map illustrates all the places and touchpoints customers come into contact with your brand, online or off ... and they help you look at your brand, product, and processes through the customer's lens so that you can visualize the literal customer journey through the funnel.

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Types of Customer Journey Maps

Since the customer journey is not linear, it also makes sense to have different types of customer journey process(s).

There are different types of customer journey maps, and they all can help you improve the customer experience - but you have to choose/create a customer journey that aligns with your specific purpose.

That said, now let's take a look at each one of them:

Current State Journey Mapping

If you want to gain a deeper understanding of what your customer experiences while interacting with your product or service right now, consider using current state mapping. This type of journey mapping is all about visualizing the thoughts, actions, and emotions of your customers as they interact with your brand's touchpoints.

Equipped with this kind of data, you can tell that your customers using Chrome to access your access are probably facing some issues.

Current state mapping allows you to compare customer experience between these different browsers, therefore, giving you room to uncover conversion roadblocks on underperforming browsers.

Future State Journey Mapping

As the name suggests, future state mapping helps you visualize what thoughts, actions, and emotions your customers will probably experience when interacting with your company in the future. In other words, they help you visualize the ideal journey you'd like your customers to embark on as they interact with your brand.

The future state is an effective customer journey map which is ideal for teams who want to close the gap between the current customer's experience and where it should be. One important thing to note here is that there's no future state customer journey design without mapping the current state first. You need to conduct research first, understand the current state, and then work on on your future state.

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