Before targeting a vertical audience, a group of customers or prospects that have a need for the product and are pretty homogeneous in other ways, that help you target them, you should consider building the following campaigns first.
1. Nurture
The first campaign you need is a campaign that caters to your existing customers. If someone signs up for your product—free or paid, doesn't matter—you need to be constantly nurturing those people. Communicate with them. Offer them new ideas, new content. They have given you their email address, they have trusted you, they said, “Hey, follow me home, here are my contact details.” Treat this great respect and attention. By giving you their information, these people meant to tell you, “I want to be kept in touch.” Update them on what you do, on new things about your product they can learn, on how to best use your product.
2. Refer
The second most important campaign is a referral program. Make it easy for existing customers to share their excitement with their friends, family, and peers. Get happy customers to share the news and to help sign up more people for your product. I wrote a blog post on how to build your first referral program.
3. Retain
The third priority is to have a campaign that helps onboard and retain your customers. Educate them on how to use your product correctly and get the most out of it. Make sure they are satisfied and are not going to leave you.
4. Post-churn
These things happen. Someone decides to leave you, to cancel the service, to stop using the product. Have a campaign that aims to get them back without being obnoxious and respecting their choice. Service them in a way that is interesting and caring. "Hey, why did you leave? Can we learn something from you so we can help our next customer better?" Be very attentive to these people. If you're able to get them back, if you're able to find out why they left, that's an amazing win. Those return customers could become your biggest fans.
Only after you've done these 4 basic campaigns can you start thinking about your unique audience, tribe, customer segment, or community that is easy to define and that will benefit from the product or the service you have to offer. Know how to talk to them, how to listen to them, how to understand their needs. Do all this, and you will build a vertical market-segment focused campaign that will get your audience excited, engaged, and lead them to become your best customers.
Your to-do list:
- Set up a nurturing campaign and update it on a regular basis with new information. In other words, keep in touch with your existing customers.
- Sign up for a referral program service, like Referral SaaSquatch.
- Create how-to videos, write an FAQ for your website, publish white papers. Produce content that will help educate your customers on how to use your product.
- Develop a survey or a questionnaire for customers that decide to leave you, to understand what made them do it.
- Make sure to lead all your visitors to dedicated landing pages to make it easier to analyze their search behavior. Some greats tips here.
