If you’re a business owner, your goal is to make more sales. Nowadays, it’s a little bit easier to do that because of the many marketing strategies you can use. Micro-marketing is one such strategy.
You need to know how to run a micro-marketing campaign effectively for it to yield your desired results, though. This guide will discuss how you can run effective micro-marketing campaigns to engage your ideal customers.
What Is Micro-Marketing?
Micro-marketing involves running a marketing campaign targeting a segment of your customer base. By running a more targeted campaign, you should be able to boost your conversion rates.
Well, that’s the basic idea.
Micro-marketing campaigns use data points such as gender, job title, age, or geography to define a portion of your customer base. You can gather this data through your CRM software, or other related tools.
Once you’ve defined whom you want to target, you need to come up with a concept for your campaign. Finally, you’ll need to monitor the results.
An effective micro-marketing campaign will provide customers with more of what they want. When that happens, your conversion rates will rise, you get the profit, and everyone is happy.
How Does Micro-Marketing Work?
You can approach a micro-marketing campaign in a variety of ways. For example, a company may decide to run a marketing program by offering special promotions on their website. They can launch a program for loyal customers or get back lost customers with discounts on landing pages. You can also try to go local by marketing goods to residents.
But you can’t blindly go about running promos without understanding your customers and their buying journey. The marketing funnel helps you with that.
Marketing funnels take your visitors on a journey to engagement and beyond. If your product is relatively new, then you’ll have to work on awareness. The aim is to continually engage your audience as they go down the funnel and generate that final conversion.
Why Use Micro-Marketing for Your Business?
Effective marketing campaigns are critical to businesses. The right marketing strategy will boost your sales, brand awareness, and conversions. Plus, the effectiveness of your company’s marketing effort determines its long-term viability.
Luckily, personalization has become so much easier. With the advancement of technology, delivering target-specific products is within reach. It’s good to note that individual marketing isn’t only for small business owners. It’s a highly effective method for any size.
Should You Run a Micro-Marketing Campaign?
Micro-marketing has many benefits, but everything has an Achilles heel. The biggest issue with micro-marketing is campaigns are difficult to scale. It takes time to develop and implement a campaign, too. Not to mention the amount of data you’ll have to gather to have accurate demographics.
So, is micro-marketing worth a try?
Definitely.
Micro-marketing campaigns help you target and sell to a market segment. Improved targeting, when done right, leads to higher profit. You just need to utilize this approach selectively in a manner that ensures you generate ROI from your efforts.
How to Launch Your Micro-Marketing Campaigns?
The previous sections covered some of the advantages and disadvantages of micro-marketing. Now here’s a step-by-step approach to creating a micro-marketing strategy. As with most marketing campaigns, you should kick things off by getting to know your customers.
- Define your buyer personas.
The building of a buyer persona should be the first step in every marketing plan. Your buyer persona helps you narrow down market segments, define the customer’s needs and wants, spending habits, among others.
You’ll have to consider qualitative and quantitative data to create a holistic buyer profile. The ideal data source depends on the tools you have access to.
Facebook and Instagram Insights are a great place to start. YouTube Analytics, your CRM, or Google Analytics are also helpful. If the need calls for it, interviews or surveys are an option.
- Write down campaign goals.
Once you’ve defined whom to target within your customer base, develop your campaign goals. Below are some common goals you might use for a campaign:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate more leads
- Increase customer order value
- Generate more sales
The campaign goals you set for your campaign should be SMART. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
For example, imagine you want to increase customer Average Order Value (AOV). A SMART goal might be to boost AOV from $36.40 by at least 20% for female customers between the ages of 20-30 within the next 60 days.
That’s a quantifiable goal you can track and use to assess the success of your campaign. Having such goals in place at the start of a campaign is critical, as it sets a baseline others can reference for measuring the campaign’s success.
- Define channels and come up with a campaign.
Now that you’ve set your campaign goals, you can find the right platform to promote yourself and reach your target segment. That’s why the qualitative aspect of creating buyer personas is so important: you need to know which platforms they frequent.
Coming up with a campaign concept is usually a brainstorming activity. You provide ideas, and your coworkers give suggestions. These ideas, however, should still be based on what you’ve gathered about your target audience and even more. So, refer to your audience personas again. Or conduct interviews and write down crucial feedback they mention about your company before the brainstorming session. Consider your target audience’s wants and needs.
You might end up with some terrible ideas, but that’s all right. Remember that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” method to developing a strong marketing plan. Research, along with an open exchange of ideas with your team, will, nevertheless, put you in a wonderful position to come up with an excellent proposal. It’s an exercise in creativity.
Launch campaign and track progress.
Once you’ve come up with an idea for a great campaign, you need to execute it. Create all the marketing materials you need. You’re going to have to do some division of labor to ensure everything gets completed during the deadline. Just use scheduling software so all of you are on the same page as to when each deliverable is due. You might also need help announcing your campaign on your site. Web design tools can help.
Once those are completed, it’s time to launch your campaign.
Don’t just announce the campaign on the same day of the launch. You need to build interest in it beforehand. The idea is to get your target audience excited and get them to rally around it when the big day comes.
That’s where email marketing can help you. Send a series of emails to your subscribers weeks before the big day, giving them bits of information about the campaign without revealing too much.
Once you finally launch your campaign, that doesn’t mean your job is done. You need to monitor it so you can figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Your goal is to make the necessary adjustments to ensure you meet your campaign goals. You also want to gain some insights that can help you run the next campaign better.
Effective Micro-Marketing Case Studies
Up to this point, we’ve covered a lot of the theory of micro-marketing. To provide a bit of inspiration for your upcoming project, here are two companies that ran successful micro-marketing campaigns that helped boost sales.
Coca-cola
The “Share a Coke” advertising campaign is a great example of effective micro-marketing. Under the campaign, individual names were written on each bottle, targeting people with those same names. That created a sense of exclusivity in the consumer with each purchase.
The “Share a Coke” campaign was a huge global success. In the US, sales for the fizzy drink rose 2% off the back of the campaign.
Nike
Every micromarketing strategy does not have to be a costly one-time ad campaign. Nike began utilizing plus-size mannequins in their stores to attract customers that fit into this demographic. That was something competitors did not do.
Searches for “Nike” and “plus-size” on British fashion site Love the Sales increased by 387% since the brand presented its new plus-size mannequin at its flagship store in London. Since the beginning of this week, clicks on the Nike One Luxe Tights, which are featured in the viral mannequin photo, climbed by 200%.
Wrapping Up
A micro-marketing campaign is a low-cost plan with a lot of room for expansion. With it, you can motivate your audience to take action by hitting them close to home. Although mass marketing has its place, the effect of a more personalized campaign is impossible to match.
This guide discussed how to run a micro-marketing campaign. Start by gathering as much information as possible about your target audience. Then set your SMART goals, define the channels you’ll use, and launch the campaign. Monitor the results, too. That way you can use the data to optimize your campaign and run better campaigns in the future.
