What does turkey hunting have to do with Marketing?

With Turkey Season just around the corner, I catch myself daydreaming and strategizing about turkeys.

I had an epiphany. Marketing is a lot like turkey hunting. It’s definitely similar when it comes to knowing your audience.

If your ROI is low when it comes to your marketing campaigns, here are four tactics for knowing your audience better and, hopefully, making more sales!

Research & Learn Your Target

There’s an art to turkey hunting. If I were an inexperienced hunter and went into the woods with no knowledge of what to do, I would never see a single turkey. It takes years of learning from experienced hunters, learning about turkeys and their habits, trying new tactics, and a ton of patience.

For instance, turkeys have a supreme sense of sight, so you must be camouflaged from head to toe. Using a blind can help hide your movements, but if you so much as blink, they can see you.

There’s also an art to marketing. You could say that most target audiences have a supreme sense of sight…the sight for being sold something they don’t want. If you come across as too “sales-y,” your audience can see it from a mile away. That’s why you have to spend time learning about your audience before you ever get started.

One of the ways we do this at Active8 is by offering what we call a Messaging Summit. In this 2-4 hour workshop with our clients, we develop their mission, vision, values, voice, and tone all based on one question: Who is your audience? Through competitor research, definable goals, and a key demographic, we can begin to hone in on that answer.

Locate Your Target

Rule number one for locating your turkey is to make it to the woods before they come down from their roost. Meet them more than halfway, and definitely don’t make them come to you if you can help it.

Use your owl call to locate your tom in his roost. They hate owls and will more often than not respond to an owl call with a shock gobble. This helps you locate them before they come down from the roost so you can be set up and ready when you start your hen calling.

If you want to be effective in generating leads, you need to take a page out of my book and meet your audience more than halfway. Don’t expect them to come to you.

How do you locate them? Well, start with a wide circle around the perimeter of the largest area you’re targeting and then narrow using different calls. For example, if you want to target volunteers for your nonprofit in Huntsville, you may start by creating a digital ad with a target audience of people between the ages of 18-65 in the city.

The more you narrow, however, the more you will be able to determine your most interested target audience. You can experiment with targeting people who attend churches, are empty-nesters/retired, or already volunteer for similar organizations. You can also target different parts of the city based on ad interactions.

With these calls, you’ll begin to see more specific results. All responses are useful to a good marketer, even if it’s no response because it helps you continue to narrow or niche down your target audience by going in a different direction. With determination and some experimentation, you’ll find the audience who cares most about what you’re selling.

Lure Your Target

Don’t overcall! When a tom responds directly to your yelp with a gobble, more often than not he is on his way. It’s time to put the call down and be still, be quiet, and wait.

Setting up a hen decoy can help distract the tom from you when he is coming to your call. Decoys, along with a blind, can only be to your advantage when you’re up against that keen vision.

There are many decoys or as they’re sometimes called in marketing, “low-hanging fruits,” for your target audience. These decoys can’t be half-hearted or lackluster. They must be extremely useful, educational, and FREE.

For example, if you have a comprehensive course you’ve created about SEO research that you ultimately want to sell, you should offer a free resource like a downloadable, comprehensive PDF guide on how to determine which SEO tool is best for your business. Make sure you collect their email in exchange for this guide and add it to your list that will then receive targeted emails about your SEO course.

You may also use a tool like LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to offer free tools directly to people within your target audience. Once they receive something free and useful from you, it’s more likely that they will check out your website to browse your premium options.

Don’t Miss Your Target

I’ve missed turkeys so many times! It can be extremely frustrating to go through so much trouble to wear camo, use the right number of calls and decoys, and wait patiently for a turkey to come within range just for them to spot me before I ever see them. It’s also easy to literally miss the shot by being nervous or impatient and shooting too soon.

The same goes with your target audience in a marketing campaign. Over and over again I see companies learn, locate, and lure their audience only to miss their shot at making a lasting customer in the end! One of the most fundamental ways this happens is with confusing calls to action.

Make sure your call to action is clear, direct, and easy to follow. Usually, it will involve a compelling headline, a luring sentence, and a large button that leads to a well-developed landing page. Your copy must be compelling! Present the problem briefly, explain how you can fix their problem, and then make the sale.

Basically, if you go out there with no knowledge of the above, you will fail miserably. In fact, you might as well stay home (and so should your audience).

But once you know these basic things about what you’re hunting, whether a turkey or a potential customer, your chances of success are much higher.

Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level?

We may be a small team, but we’re mighty. Offering a large suite of marketing tools like social media calendar planning and creation, email marketing, blog writing, brand redesign, digital marketing, and more, Active8 has over 20 years of experience helping companies exceed their goals. Find out how Active8 can take your company to the next level.