A staggering 96% of sales professionals admit to needing help during the initial stages of their sales cycle. It’s no wonder, given the harm that poorly targeted sales and marketing outreach can do to a company.
What does poor marketing and sales targeting look like? Buyers know it when they see it:
- Sales emails that don’t reflect the nuances or lingo of a prospect’s industry
- Ads that don’t speak authentically to the concerns of specific personas
- Broken messaging that’s fundamentally misaligned to a buyer’s stage in their sales journey
- And more
How Does Poor Marketing and Sales Targeting Harm Brand Reputation?
There are a few ways in which poor marketing and sales targeting can wreck your rep. Here’s a few.
1. It Makes You Seem Out of Touch
When your messaging is irrelevant to the people you reach, your brand appears tone deaf and ignorant of your buyers’ needs.
Consider these poor marketing and sales targeting scenarios:
- You’re selling a new payment processing solution that offers savings to businesses with high transaction volumes. But your ads are targeting businesses that wouldn’t really save money with your service.
- You want to grow your business in a specific territory, so you start cold-calling every potential account in the area, hoping to drum up business. This winds up burning out your sales reps and annoying potential customers — including some who might have been willing to buy from you in the future. Sadly, you’re now added to their blocked contacts list.
2. It Leads to Wasted Resources
If you’re not targeting the right audience, you’re wasting your resources.
Think about it this way: If you’re selling skis, you’re not going to have much success selling them in a tropical country. You might have the odd sale here and there, but you’re mostly wasting time and money.
B2B selling is similar. Your total addressable market may consist of tens of thousands of potential customers — but many of those customers have no intention of making a purchase any time soon.
Marketing to every single member of your TAM wastes time — theirs and yours — and also wastes money. Instead, your resources should be focused on the subset of customers who are in-market. Concentrating your efforts on the people who want what you have to sell will generate better results.
3. It Harms Your SEO Efforts
We all know that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for our businesses. It’s no wonder that companies spend over $79 billion annually on it. But what you might not know is that poor marketing and sales targeting can actually harm your SEO efforts.
When you target the wrong accounts, they won’t be interested in what you have to say. They won’t click on your links or convert on your offers, either. This sends a signal to Google that your website isn’t relevant to what prospects are looking for.
As a result, your website will be less likely to show up in search results.
What’s more, if people do stumble upon your website and see that it’s not relevant to them, they’re quickly going to click away. This increases your bounce rate, another signal to Google that your website isn’t relevant. The higher your bounce rate, the lower you’ll rank in search results.
Fixing Poor Marketing and Sales Targeting
The RevTech Revolution has made it much easier to streamline your targeting efforts and stronger sales results, all while protecting your brand. These tools help you:
Identify Your Most Promising Leads
Intent data and predictive analytics can be powerful tools for identifying your best leads. By tracking the online behavior of your prospects, you can get a better sense of their level of interest and intent. This information can then be used to prioritize outreach.
Focus Your Marketing and Sales Efforts
Once you’ve identified your best leads, focus your marketing and sales efforts on them. With intent data, you can see which kinds of content prospects most engage with, and what topics they’re interested in. You can use this information to create targeted content and campaigns that appeal directly to their needs.
Measure Your Results
Finally, it’s important to measure your results so you can see how your targeting efforts are paying off.
With predictive analytics, you can track the progress of your leads through the sales funnel and identify which ones are most likely to convert. You can use this information to fine-tune your marketing and sales strategy for even better results.
Get It Right With Your Marketing and Sales Targeting
Poor marketing and sales targeting can have a seriously negative impact on a brand’s reputation. It makes you seem out of touch, untrustworthy, and ineffective. This can drive away potential customers.
Using intent data and predictive analytics can help fix this problem. This is because you’re able to see which leads are most likely to buy from you. Book a demo today to see how 6sense can help you grow your brand reputation and your pipeline.
