Know What a Target Audience Is?

Your target audience is a group of people who are interested in your products or services and therefore, they are on whom your sales and marketing team should set their sights on. The B2B target audience, who will see your ads, is usually the promising prospective customers of 20 percent who gives 80 percent of business according to the Pareto principle. The personal relationships with the customers whom you know and have come across face to face or who are long-term buyers. 

Businesses generally create user personas to know their target audience. Their decisions on marketing campaigns depend on these personas. Then, they need to think about what their core offering to the customers is, who would benefit by this, the pain points you would solve for customers, and what makes your brand or product unique. 

Why Is Sales and Marketing Alignment Important?

Your sales and marketing teams have the same objective of driving potential customers to company’s website and increasing sales, as well as revenue. Sales and marketing alignment over a target audience helps attract, engage and convert the prospective customers who are important to your business. Misaligned marketing and sales teams are at a disadvantage of running an inefficient process, which is putting efforts with no clear objective; the result, missed opportunities and a waste of time. 

The recent surveys conducted by HubSpot reveal that 79 percent of marketing leads hardly convert owing to a failure to promote consumer connections. Where sales and marketing align, they agree on the right customer showing their understanding of the same story why the target audience decides to buy. Thus, this shortens the sales cycle and improves the conversion rate.

Various Ways to Get Them Target the Right Audience

Of course, collaborating your sales and marketing teams offers some benefits, but that is not all, you should also know how to make them work together effectively.

1. Have a face-to-face meeting: With an initial meeting, you can have both the teams know what you are trying to attain, as well as why you are doing it. Collaborating will help everyone in the team be effective in their job. In the meeting you need to discuss some topics like the ideal lead, customer personas and sales funnel and friction points in it.

An ideal lead helps conversion but what makes an ideal or quality lead. There is no use nurturing leads that do not convert. Have your marketing and sales team work together and define the quality lead. With the sales team giving their experience of converting the leads and marketing team sharing the data gathered earlier in the sales cycle, they can define the perfect lead and share the traits that help convert or do not convert.

The process of developing customer personas focuses more on marketing; nevertheless, effective personas are beneficial to everyone. They are your ideal customers’ generalized representations, which are created by asking all possible questions to your buyers. 

The sales funnel, which is a process the customer passes through, is the one both your sales and marketing teams would be aware of. Asking the teams to explain the sales funnel and the sales process will help know whether they match with the descriptions and what each team’s role is in the funnel. Once you have done this, you can discuss the friction points they have come across and the part that was not working effectively.

2.Have your sales team involved in content creation: Content creation is just not the marketing team’s job; instead, you can have your sales team join the marketing team in idea generation. There are a few ways in which they can be part of content creation.

• Sharing ideas and shortlisting them
• Working together to customize the content that meets the requirements of the customer
• Testing the ideas on prospective customers

Do your sales and marketing teams target the right audience? If they do, in what ways they work together to define the target audience.