There’s a common understanding in marketing that suggests that you already know your audience because you talk with sales and perform initial marketing feasibility and competitive studies or use an outside source to gather this data. That’s the old way, and traditionally has worked well, and should work well today. However, when marketing promotional budget is on the line and management is questioning ROI from marketing spend, it’s a good idea, if not critical to success, to spend as little as possible to acquire audience that is more likely to be interested in your product or service. In order to do this, you need to have a good understanding of your target audience.
The best way to understand your target audience is to research and get as much data as you can to first identify your audience and second, target that audience criteria when considering promotional marketing channel spend. And what if this data is not readily available from prior campaigns that have been running? These questions arise in organizations that are large and mature in marketing promotion as well as start ups that are looking at adding marketing promotions for a new product launch or adding digital marketing into the traditional marketing mix.
There is no better way to do this than with the information you already have about your campaigns and the targets they’ve captured as members within the campaign. Absent of this info? No problem, with customers and opportunities in a Salesforce (or CRM) database, we can use the following method to determine the audience criteria (job title, firmographic and geographic details) that responds to the product or solution we’re offering.
Here’s the video below with the details of how to create a report that will help to get some of this data out of Salesforce. [VIEW IN FULL SCREEN, select square brackets in lower right corner of video player]
What I demonstrate in the video is the following process to creating a report that will help us later to filter the contact job titles that have demonstrated buyer intent. To create the report, we follow the steps below.
1. Create a Report using the report type Contacts & Accounts
2. use Standard Report Filters
3. Show All Accounts (you can filter this later)
4. Date Field: Select the Newly Created Roll Up Summary field (see below) and under Range Select Last 30 Days if you have a lot of data or “all time” if you have little data (you’re a start up company or the product area is new) or select a few quarters of data, from the drop down menu. By choosing the most recent data, we are reporting on recent firmographic and contact history, thereby, giving us the most up to date insights.
Once the report is created, you can download the report and pivot summary tables in Excel to gain insights into the common titles, industries, verticals, and other firmographic and demographic details you need to ensure you have an audience that has shown buyer intent in your product or solution.
When deciding target audience segments and target audience criteria it’s not a good idea to guess based on anecdotal suggestions or casual conversations with the sales teams. Of course, if you’ve been interacting with customers and prospects directly in your organization and promoting similar products to those audiences, you probably have most of the information in your customer database that will help to validate the targeting criteria for a successful campaign marketing spend.
Performing this audience and market research is more about the insights you’ve learned from tying many of these methods and to correlate these insights together to form cohort analysis that gives you the most accurate data about your audience. With this data in hand, you can send this to your media agencies or add them into your targeting criteria across your many channels to promote your content, products and solutions and be assured that you’ve prepared yourself with a targeted audience.
p.s: In the video, I show a report that used a roll up summary field.
Below are the steps to take to create a roll up summary field in Salesforce.
The Roll Up Summary field on Account can be found by going to settings, and selecting accounts from the left field menu and select “field” under the account, and select “create new”.
1. Select “Roll Up Summary”
2. Select “Opportunity”
3. Name it “Latest Opp Date”
4. Roll-Up Type is Max
5. Field to Aggregate is Close Date
6. Filter Criteria: All Records should be included in the Calculation
See the below screenshot if you want to locate common fields available in the opportunity object
The above roll up field will calculate the Latest date of the Opportunity irrespective of whether it is Closed or Open. Now it will be available to you for use in selecting this within the “Date Field” filter while customizing the Contacts & Accounts report.
Originally posted 2017-08-23 19:55:08.
