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Your feeling the squeeze of tightening budgets? Struggling to make a big marketing impact with limited resources? 

If so, you’re in right place, because today we’re stepping you through an approach to help get your marketing back on track, on a tight budget: it’s called audience-centric marketing.

In today’s episode we’ll cover:

• How to truly understand your audience.

• The secret to creating content that not only resonates but stops your audience mid-scroll.

• Why spreading yourself thin is a recipe for disaster, and how to focus on what really works for your business.

No matter where you’re at in your business journey, I’m confident that you’ll walk away with actionable insights that you can implement and add to your marketing strategy right away.

If we haven’t met, my name is Jordan McFadyen from Done By Nine, a strategic marketing company, and this is the ‘Marketing Clarity, Through The Clutter’ series, designed to help you navigate the cluttered world of marketing and challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing towards planning an intentional marketing strategy.  

The reason for this audio series is that now more than ever, we’re seeing businesses need help to stay ahead of the curve, manage (or find) marketing budgets and build their brands – which can feel overwhelming in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. 

In each episode of this series, we’ll dive deep into modern business challenges – challenges that businesses we talk with are facing every day – offering straightforward solutions. Whether you’re a seasoned marketing pro or a business owner looking to maximise your impact or guide your team, you’re in the right place.

And as mentioned in the intro, we’re diving into a more relevant topic than ever in today’s economic climate: how to maximise your marketing impact when budgets are tight.

I’m talking daily with business owners and marketing teams about how businesses feel the squeeze. Conversations about marketing budgets being being slashed, but but you’re still expected to deliver results. 

I’m sure this is a familiar story.

We’ve been here before, my business was brand-new when Covid hit in March 202.

At the time, we had little to no resources and little to no cash available, but this forced us to think about how to get more creative with our marketing, more strategic and deliberate to make sure that we were talking to a very particular niche audience, who would be interested to learn more about our business and the services that we were providing.  

Cash is also tight right now, there’s the temptation to stop spending money and resources on marketing.

As a marketer, it’s natural for me to sit here and tell you that this shouldn’t be how to approach this. 

But it is truly the case – I always say that tighter marketing budgets and smaller resources allow a better opportunity for you to be more strategic and deliberate with your marketing.

It’s a way to force companies to be more strategic about their spending, focusing on channels that offer the highest return on investment.

And here’s another point you need to think about a tight budget doesn’t mean you can’t make a big impact.

Having a tight budget can be the push you need to get really creative and focused on your marketing efforts. 

Ultimately, to get more strategic and better with your marketing, there’s a consistent key that you need to remember: understand your audience/customer like you never understood them before.

In this episode, I’m going to take you through how audience-centric marketing can help you make the most of your resources and drive real results, even when budgets are tight. 

Here’s a round-up of the key action points and items that we’ll cover:

1. We’ll take a deep dive into understanding your audience

2. We’ll discuss how to tailor your content to your audience – and connect with them/help them stop their scroll.

3. We’ll focus on your proven channels – this isn’t the time to do too much testing

4. We’ll explore strategies for capturing and retaining attention

5. And finally, we’ll cover some cost-effective strategies for audience engagement – so that you appear consistent in the eyes of your audience.

A Deep Dive into Understanding Your Audience

The foundation of any effective marketing strategy, especially when resources are limited, is a deep understanding of your audience. 

Every podcast and blog that I record has this simple element included. Every strategy session our team runs with a client focuses on this core component. 

And this goes beyond basic demographics – what I want you to do here is really get into your customers’ minds.

How do we do this? By creating detailed buyer personas.

These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and some guesses/research about customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals.

Why do they need to see your product and service? What are you specifically going to offer them?

So, let’s walk through how to create an accurate buyer persona. 

The first step may sound a bit silly, but we always start by giving our persona’s actual names. Even sourcing some stock imagery that gives us a picture of what this person looks like. 

When we set up a new campaign, sign off on a social media schedule or review an email – we review it alongside that name, photo, and persona you’ve created.

Trust me, it helps ensure that you’re truly in the mind of your prospective customer.

I have this document bookmarked on my computer, and I frequent it often.

So, let’s break down the aspects we need to look at with this customer persona:

1. Start with demographics: age, marital status, income, and education levels. Not only does this help you build a picture of this person’s life, pain points and desires, but it’s also crucial because platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google will ask for this information when you’re building ad campaigns.

2. Consider their values: Step into their world – think about what they care about right now. Do they have strong feelings about current issues or politics? Are they interested in high fashion? Is their family their core value? 

Doing this research helps with interest-based targeting; this is crucial information that can guide your content creation. What messages resonate with your audience?

3. Think about their daily routine: What does a day in their life look like? What times can/should you reach them? What are their most rewarding and frustrating moments? 

Timing can be everything: sending an email and posting an Instagram story. 

This information helps with content timing and, the big one, relevance. Is your message and content relevant to the current day of your audience?

Whether they are looking for an outlet or desire or facing a challenge or pain point that they need help solving.

4. Identify their problems and purchasing story: What issues do they face in their personal and work lives? How are they trying to deal with these problems? Is your product and service serving that pain point or answering one of their desires to make their life easier and better?

Make sure you consider your audience’s purchasing story: how will they ultimately purchase from you? What does that journey look like?

Many people refer to this as a ‘funnel’ – but I like to encourage you to think about your audience and potential customers as people and not a number simply moving down a pretend funnel.

Focus on people and their journey and discovery of your business.

This will help you craft content that addresses their issues and shows how your product or service can help. Our how your product or service will help satisfy their desire.

As I mentioned above, we can use lots of methods to gather this information – and I’d encourage you to consider:

– Analyse your existing customer data – use tools like Google Analytics, your email open rates, and your social media insights. 

– Conducting customer interviews and surveys is the best way to learn more about your customer. Chat with existing customers about how they found you and why they purchased from you. We’ve even reached out and interviewed customers who we’d love to have as customers one day, and we’ve found out more about their personas. 

Tailoring Content to Your Audience

Once you have a clear picture of your audience, it’s time to create content that resonates with them. 

This is where your buyer personas really come into play. This is why the first step is so critical.

Creating messaging that resonates is all about speaking your audience’s language. 

Use the terms they use, address the problems they face, and show how you can help them achieve their goals. Show them you understand their desires and lifelong ambitions. Explain how your product and service will help them get there.

Your content should feel like it’s written specifically for them.

When we work with a new client, we take a customer persona and start working through the key messaging and the unique selling points. 

Do this exercise now; try to write down and think about 5 to 10 unique points about what you can offer your audience better than anyone else.

Don’t just stop at “we offer engineering services’, go deeper.

There are a lot of companies that work in engineering. What you need to be thinking about precisely is what your engineering company is doing better than all of your competition. 

Is it pricing transparency? Are you using a unique product to deliver your service? Are you using a unique way to deliver your product? 

What are you doing better than anyone else in your industry?

These are your uniques, the backbone of your messaging and the content you need to start developing and showing the world.

We then need to consider where we’ll use these unique selling points. Choosing the right formats and the right channels is crucial.

It would help if you had these in your customers ‘purchasing story, which we discussed earlier. If not, answer these questions, return to your purchasing story, and fill in the blanks.

Based on your customer persona, where does your audience hang out online? What types of content do they prefer? Video, PDF, audio, video?

Some audiences might love in-depth blog posts, while others prefer quick video tips on social media. 

Use your audience insights to guide these decisions. It’ll then come down to testing – remember, there is no silver bullet in marketing. 

Once you test your messaging to your direct audience, ask for feedback and review your data to ensure the content resonates with your audience and helps you move you closer to your overall marketing goals.

You’ll then want to consider balancing your evergreen and topical content.

Here’s the breakdown: Evergreen content provides long-term value and continues to be relevant over time, while topical content can help you capitalise on current trends and events while supporting your brand.

A mix of both can help you maintain consistent engagement while also staying current and relevant.

Focusing on Proven Channels

Chances are, you’re feeling pretty overwhelmed with the plethora of content options and distribution networks. 

Especially when budgets are running tight, it’s crucial to focus on the marketing channels that have proven to be most effective for your business. 

This is where data analytics comes in handy; matched with your ideal customer persona and the customer purchasing story we brainstormed earlier becomes essential.

It’ll help you prioritise the channels that are making a direct impact on your business and not on the channels that aren’t. 

Just because TikTok is popular right now, does that mean you and your business need to be on there?

If your ideal customer is consuming your type of content there, absolutely use TikTok. 

If not, don’t spread yourself too thin. If resources are stretched already, identify your most effective marketing channels. This means looking at your data to see which channels drive the most traffic, leads, and conversions. 

Tools like Google Analytics can be incredibly helpful here.

We had a client in the B2B software space who was spreading their budget thin across multiple channels. 

We spent time with the client digging into their data and looking at their content, which was resonating, and we found that LinkedIn was by far their most effective channel for lead generation. 

It wasn’t only getting the most engagement, but the data was also clear that it was converting the most potential clients.

By reallocating more of their budget and resources to LinkedIn and optimising their approach there, we could increase their lead generation by 150% without increasing their overall marketing spend.

So, before exploring new channels, jumping on a fad or allocating more resources to platforms, I suggest you focus on optimising your existing ones. 

To recap what we’ve covered:

– Refining your messaging (focus on your ideal audience)

– Improving your targeting (focus on your ideal audience)

– Enhancing your content quality (focus on your ideal audience)

You can see the pattern and the main message I want to convey – focus your content on your ideal audience. 

To wrap up, let’s recap the key strategies we’ve discussed and the actions that you need to take right now:

1. Develop a deep understanding of your audience through detailed buyer personas

2. Tailor your content and unique messages to focus on responding with your ideal audience.

3. Focus on and optimise your most effective marketing channels. Don’t be everything to everyone, everywhere. You won’t get ahead.

Remember, audience-centric marketing isn’t just a short-term tactic – it’s a long-term strategy that can help you build lasting relationships with your customers. 

By truly understanding and catering to your audience, you can make every marketing dollar count, even when budgets are tight.