Building your target audience list is a critical task that every marketer must go through. There are a few ways to go about doing this:

1. Buying a list –  Sounds easy right? You do not have to do the leg work and you will obtain a list of potentially great customers. This is by far the easiest way to start marketing to an audience but it does come at a cost. Make sure the list will reflect your intended audience and that you trust who you are buying from. Once you give the green light on the purchase, you will have saved a lot of time and will be ready to spend that time on creating remarkable marketing content. Even though this is one of the easiest ways to obtain a list, don’t mail it it (pun intended) work with your list provider (preferably us) to work through demographics to get the best return on your marketing investment. While purchasing a list can be an easy and relatively inexpensive way to get some future contacts, spending quality time with your sales rep discussing your intended audience will dramatically improve the performance of your campaign. There is an amazing amount of data available to target your message to the best prospects. 
2. Capture leads through online form submissions – This is a great way to get highly valuable audience members since they opt into being there themselves. Form captures can be slow to obtain and hinges on you creating engaging online content but in the end, every person on that list wants to know about you and what you are selling. 
3. Build your own list – Not the easiest but definitely the most rewarding and potentially most valuable. This is what we would like to elaborate on in this post. 

When you build your own list, you must have and audience in mind. Who are you trying to reach? This is something you need to decide as a company and usually can be done quite easily but if you don’t know, start with who is the best candidate to buy your product? Who are your best customers and how do you find more like them? Who are your worst customers and how do you avoid marketing to more like them? Once this is established you are ready to research. 

One example we can give is our own list building experience. We were working on a dimensional direct mail campaign and we wanted to reach out to local Churches. We simply Googled “Churches around me” and started going to each website. Once on the site, we were able to find a staff directory (for the most part) and pinpoint the person that we wanted to receive our direct mail piece, (i.e. someone in the communications department). We added a Church name, phone number, contact name, email and whatever pertinent information we thought we would need later on. Pretty easy but time consuming and we haven’t even gotten to part two. 

The second portion of this process was to call on these contacts and give a brief introduction of our company and what we were intending to do. Basically asking if they were the point of contact for marketing decisions for the Church and if so, would they mind if we sent them a mailer. Everyone that answered said yes, who doesn’t want to get a package or letter in the mail? 

Once we got the confirmation of the intended addressee, we were ready to go. Then we are ready to start marketing, measuring, adjusting, improving, and then marketing again. Refine your process as you get returns on your previous list building experience. Start small and cast a larger net as you gain confidence in your results. 

Building your own list may not be this easy, Churches like to have their staff directory on their page so this was a benefit for this audience. Most businesses will have a website that you can mine for info but if they don’t, a phone number will surely be available to call and ask who is the best point of contact. You don’t even need to talk to them that day, just the right name and address will suffice for a mail campaign. There are a growing number of tools available if you spend a little time researching, Linkedin is great for finding B2B contacts, be creative and invest in good CMS to manage your contacts as you build your data. Social media is great for building your B2C lists, Facebook, Twitter and instagram are great resources to help build your consumer database and develop great cross media campaigns.  

After all that research and list building, make sure you have a remarkable piece to send out to those people. Doing all the groundwork and building is only worth it if what you are sending is going to make an impression. 

Remember, The Voom Group is here to help you when you need it. Happy Marketing!