Create Target Marketing Strategies Based on Clients’ Life Events

Developing effective target marketing strategies is the foundation of your marketing. The reason is simple: If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know what to say.

Knowing and reaching the right people will

• Save time and money on your marketing efforts
• Communicate with the people who need and want what you do
• Attract the clients you love to work for

Whenever I find a target market​ing strategy that helps me reach “my people,” I count it a big win.

My ears pricked up at a networking group, when a fellow member handed out a flyer from his company.

It was intended to help their salesmen solicit referrals. He said, “Give it to your friends, but also look at it as a marketing tool for yourself.”

Brilliant.

The flyer is a trifold with various questions. One set begins, “Do you know someone who …”

Target Marketing Strategies Based on Clients’ Life Events

It’s a common strategy to create a buyer persona — a composite client or customer​ who represents a specific person you serve in your market. Marketers create this person with a set of demographic characteristics, along with their culture and attitudes.

But they don’t often mention triggering events, which can be even more pertinent. Why is your client​ seeking you out ​now​ — as opposed to some other time?

The flyer asks about life cycle events that would prompt someone to buy financial services and products:

• First job
• Recently promoted
• New baby
• Planning for college

And so forth, with 11 possibilities running up through retirement.

Your Prospects’ Life Events

Taking a cue from that flyer, what events  would trigger someone to use your services? I can think of several for my work:

• Expanding their business
• Spending too much time on face-to-face networking
• New website
• Decision to branch into content marketing.

And what about your clients?

• A real estate agent’s clients might have children reaching school age as a reason to move.
• A hypnotist might see a client who’s become aware that some behavior is out of control.
• A nutritionist might see client facing a diabetic diagnosis.
• A chiropractor might see patients as a result of an injury.

Does that give you some ideas?

Here are some resources to spur your thinking:

• Hubspot offers 30 Types of Sales Trigger Events and How to Track Them​. They’re mostly business​ events rather than life events, but they can give you some more ideas.
• ​Right On Interactive explores some obvious and not-so-obvious life cycle events in How Do Life Events Trigger Lifecycle Marketing?

​Can you think of 10–12 triggering events that might cause clients to seek you out? If so, you’ve got the basis for some powerful target marketing strategies.

These can go into your target market analysis, your buyer persona and other foundational marketing documents.

These questions can also figure in your content marketing plan, with pages, blog posts, videos, and other material dealing with that specific triggering event and how you can help.

Target Marketing Strategies: Meeting Your People Where They Are

​The people in your target market are more than a collection of demographics. They’re facing problems in their lives that you can help with.

Change is always stressful — good change or bad change. And people’s lives are always changing in different spheres of life:

• Personal
• ​Family
• ​Professional​
• Job
• ​Society at large

If you can identify their life cycle triggers, you can develop target marketing strategies to help them navigate those changes.

Would you like some help? I develop digital marketing services that begin first and foremost with your target market. Contact me for a free half-hour conversation exploring your business goals and strategies to meet those goals.