Successful businesses recognize the importance of customer acquisition. They utilize the most relevant customer acquisition channels and employ effective strategies to get in front of prospective customers. One way you can do this is through micromarketing.
In this guide, I will look at micromarketing. I’ll cover some of the basic things you should know about micromarketing. I’ll then discuss how to run an effective micromarketing campaign. With that in mind, let’s dive in!
What is Micromarketing?
Micromarketing is a type of marketing that targets a particular subset of your larger customer base. Your goal is to target a small subset of people with similar interests, occupations, age, location, income, or buying behavior.
Let’s say you own a marketing agency that promotes products or services to SMEs. You realize that your digital marketing service also attracts many small retail stores. Hence, you decide to formulate a marketing strategy aimed at the niche of small retail store owners. That would be an example of micromarketing. You’ve defined your target market, and you’re running a campaign aimed at engaging these people.
What Are the Benefits of Micromarketing?
Businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, use micromarketing. Micromarketing enables a company to address and sell to a hyper-specific market segment with a single marketing strategy. Implemented correctly, improved targeting results in higher conversions, which means more sales.
While micromarketing does offer higher rewards, there are risks. The most obvious problem is micromarketing campaigns are hard to scale. Setting up every micromarketing campaign will take time to formulate and execute. On the other hand, a mass marketing campaign is far easier to execute, and you can target a larger audience.
I’m not saying that one type of marketing campaign is better than another. Each type of marketing campaign has a place in your business. At Lform, we run mass marketing campaigns to help us stand out as a web design agency in the US. We also run micromarketing campaigns targeting companies in specific verticals.
How to Run an Effective Micromarketing Campaign
We’ve now covered some of the pros and cons of micromarketing. With that out of the way, I want to break down a step-by-step process you can follow to launch a micromarketing campaign for your business.
Step 1: Create a Buyer Persona
The first step of any marketing campaign should be the creation of a buyer persona. A persona will help you define the customer’s needs and wants, personality, and purchase triggers. To build a complete buyer persona, consider both qualitative and quantitative data.
The best sources of data for your buyer persona will be unique to your business. You might use Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, YouTube Analytics, your
Your end goal is to create something that looks a bit like the image below.
Your customer persona will be a vital resource for your marketing campaign.
As you design your campaign, you should ask yourself, “would this campaign appeal to my customer persona?” As you make your marketing creative, you should ask yourself, “would this copy appeal to customer persona?”
Your customer persona won’t define the success or failure of your micromarketing campaign. I’m sure many effective micromarketing campaigns never went through the process of considering who they were targeting. However, I do believe that if you are clear on who you are targeting, there is a higher chance that you’ll run a successful micro marketing campaign.
Step 2: Design Your Campaign
There are a lot of great books about advertising written by experts in their field. One of the themes I’ve found in these books is that coming up with a great advertising campaign is usually a combination of genius and random insight.
Some people talk about getting inspiration when they have a shower, others get their best ideas when they exercise or just after they wake up. There is no process for inspiration.
The expertise is less about how you develop the idea and seems to be more about the execution. With that in mind, here are a few things to consider when designing your micromarketing campaign:
- Work with experts: try to hire people who are great at their chosen profession. That could be an amazing video production team, website developers, copywriters, or whatever. That expertise will greatly improve the chance of success.
- Small teams are better: keep the number of decision-makers on your product down to a minimum. If you have a big team meeting, there’s a high chance that everyone sitting around the table will have something to say. Those insights can dilute a good idea.
- Set a clear timetable: once you’ve defined your strategy, set out a clear timetable for your micromarketing campaign. Set deadlines for work, and assign responsibility for tasks.
Those three lessons have served me well in business. If you apply these lessons to your business, you’ll greatly increase your chance of running a successful micro-marketing campaign.
Step 3: Execute the Campaign & Review the Results
Once you’ve designed your micro-marketing campaign, you need to see if your ideas will generate your target audience’s desired reaction. Hopefully, your micro-marketing campaign will generate the results you desire.
You need to track the performance of your micro-marketing campaign. You should have clearly defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in place that allow you to assess its success.
For example, with a paid advertising campaign, one of the most important metrics is your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). That is the amount of money you make relative to the amount you are spending. If the ROAS is positive, you are making money, and you can scale the campaign. That’s great news.
When analyzing the results of your micromarketing campaign, make sure to look out for the warning signs. If you’re not getting the results you hoped, go back to the drawing board and make changes to your campaign. For example, you can run split tests with an online campaign to see if a change improves the conversion rate.
2 Examples of Effective Micromarketing
Micromarketing can be an effective way to grow your business. Many companies have experienced massive growth off the back of a considered micromarketing campaign. To give you a bit of inspiration for your micromarketing campaigns, I’ll share two such examples.
Facebook Case Study
Facebook is a great example of a company that utilized local marketing campaigns as part of its growth strategy. The company started as a project targeting students at Harvard University with harvard.edu email addresses.
The Facebook became very popular with this localized community of Harvard students. As the company grew, the company changed its positioning from a tool that would help students at Harvard connect to a network that would help students connect.
The company slowly expanded by running localized marketing campaigns targeting colleges. Eventually, as the user base grew, The Facebook went from running localized micro-marketing campaigns to broader mass marketing campaigns.
Facebook is a nice example of a company that utilized different marketing strategies to promote growth. You can see that their initial micro-marketing campaigns played a key part in the company’s rapid growth. There’s a nice article on Medium that covers the early growth of the company.
CocaCola Case Study
A nice counterpoint to the Facebook example is Coca-Cola. In 2011 the company launched its “Share a Coke” campaign in Australia.
The premise of the campaign was quite simple. On the label of the Coca-Cola bottles, they printed the most popular male and female first names. So, you had bottles of Coca-Cola with the name James, Laura, etc., printed on them.
The initial campaign was a big success and boosted sales in the Australian market. Coca-cola then launched the campaign in other markets. For example, they ran the campaign in the US. In each of the markets, the Share a Coke campaign generated increased sales. Over time, the sales started to dip, and Coca-Cola stopped the campaign.
Summing Up
Micromarketing is a more effective way to reach a segment of your target market better than a mass marketing campaign. The effectiveness of micromarketing lies in the targeting. With the right messaging, you can drastically increase the chance of a conversion.
This guide looked at why micromarketing is effective before discussing how to run an effective campaign. I then wrapped things up by providing two illustrative examples of successful micromarketing campaigns. I hope this article has inspired you to give micromarketing a try.
