Last week we were joined by Kristal Howard, Director of Corporate Communications & Media Relations at The Kroger Co., along with Seth Gilpin, Product Marketing Manager at Cision, to discuss the importance of understanding the wants and needs of your customers in our webinar The Audience Journey.
Tailoring your message to specific audiences is a crucial part of retaining and earning new business, although being able to understand the strategy behind using the data is key when relating to specific customer segments. We wanted to share the key findings from the discussion in order to help you refine your strategy and reach your audience in the most effective way.
Prioritize Key Messages, Audiences and Channels
You need to be able to customize your narrative for each audience segment— and that goes for internal as well as external audiences. The same message will not apply for all the stakeholders within your organization's audience- for example, think of Kroger employees who were working in-store vs. employees working elsewhere in the organization when COVID-19 hit; each audience had different needs and priorities- so being able to prioritize key messages to specific audiences and channels is an important part of this strategy.
“It’s critical when you have such a large audience and consumer base for a publicly traded company with many external communities and stakeholders. You need to you know which messages are most relevant for specific groups,” says Kristal Howard.
Know the Audience Buying Journey
There are three parts to the audience buying journey:
Being able to know which stage a segment of your audience is in within the buyer journey is key when building out a cadence. It’s also important to remember to stay consistent within these cadences in the specific stages of the journey.
Data, Data, Data and More Data
“Having an abundance of great data along with the tools and technology to capture it is nothing without the skillset to interpret the data,” says Seth Gilpin. “In order to know how the data will prove ROI for your organization you need to be able to make sense of it and understand the strategy of how you promote insights for your brand.”
Using demographic and firmographic data to uncover new audience segments can also help shape effective campaigns and inform storytelling strategies that resonate with your reader.
Bonus: Top Tip
Once you have tracked who it was that saw your earned coverage at certain stages of the buyer journey, and where they are from, you can invest in paid media to retarget the same audience.
