Dialing Up an Audience-Centric Approach to Marketing

Transforming your organization from product-centric to audience-centric requires more than just focusing on benefits over features. It requires a commitment to deeply understanding your buyers and engaging them in new ways. It requires a fundamental shift in thinking from “What is the best way to position this offering for my audience?” to “What do members of my audience care about, what are their needs, and how can we help them fulfill those needs?”

Our data shows that organizations that go to market with an audience-centric model experience many benefits, including better audience engagement, elevated response and conversion rates, increased marketing  contribution to pipeline and revenue, improved sales and marketing alignment, and greater sales productivity.

According to our research, faster-growing organizations are 90 percent more likely to have at least 70 percent of their content mapped to a buyer audience. We’ve seen clients improve website traffic up to 73 percent and increase engagement rates as much as 200 percent over target by embracing an audience-centric approach.

To take an audience-centric approach, we suggest that you start with these three questions:

• Have you clearly identified your target audiences? The first step to audience-centricity is a clear focus on who to target. For a specified business line or offering, clients can use the SiriusDecisions Audience Framework to drive alignment with product, marketing and sales leaders to formally define the target segments at multiple audience levels such as industry, region, organization type, buying center and persona.
• How much do you know about buyer personas, including their challenges, initiatives and needs? Understanding buyer needs is crucial to becoming audience-centric. SiriusDecisions defines a need as a desired outcome that has business value for a specific persona. Are you talking to your buyers? Do you really understand their desired outcomes? Messaging, content, launches and campaigns should be planned around audiences and their needs, not offerings and their features.
• Are our go-to-market strategies and tactics aligned around our target buyer’s behaviors and preferences? Audience-centric delivery requires marketing, creative, demand and sales enablement teams to align around the buyer’s journey to deliver content effectively. Buyer’s journey maps, along with the persona profiles produced by portfolio marketing, can be used by demand creation teams to determine the right mix of offers and tactics that should be developed at each buying stage to drive inquiries and lead opportunities.

If you’re ready to transform your marketing organization and drive better results, download our e-book “Marketing Transformation: Dialing Up an Audience-Centric Approach.” It’s a good place for CMOs and  portfolio marketing leaders to start, and it provides a sneak peek at the  SiriusDecisions Go-to-Market Design Process Framework, which is based on best practices for developing an audience-centric go-to-market approach.