Every business owner will have asked the following question “How many potential customers exist in this market?”
Digital marketing can provide the answer, helping you to identify, quantify and prioritise your target customers.
Two of the key channels to do this are Google Ads and LinkedIn.
To understand how, consider the following example: A business that is based in Australia, has clients nationwide, and sells software products that are applicable to law firms and recruitment companies, respectfully.
This example business has the capacity to service new leads and customers, however, like many businesses, it has limited strategic and marketing resources. Therefore, it can only truly focus on one customer group… not two.
So who should they focus on: lawyers or recruiters?
Google Ads
Businesses can use Google Ads to quantify the search volumes relating different customer groups. This is called keyword research and good marketers will be able to not only research search volumes, but also the expected cost of ads and how competitive bidding on those terms is.
Take our example: in the example’s geography, there are 3X the number of searches for software relating to recruitment agencies than there are law firms. There is also less competition.
LinkedIn Ads
Another channel that can be utilised to identify target customers is LinkedIn Ads. Take our example, and targeting companies in Australia, with between $1m and $100m in annual revenue, more than 10 staff, and then narrowing down to the key ownership job titles, would result in 4,200 individuals to target in the recruitment market and 5,100 in the legal market.
Conclusion
There are obviously many other considerations to take into account when evaluating target markets, but as a key initial step, Google Ads and LinkedIn can provide great objective context in helping to identify, quantify and prioritise target customers.
