Nearly every marketing strategy starts with: know your audience. How and what you communicate largely impacts who you communicate to. But that’s easier said than done. So let’s talk about identifying and understanding your target audience.
Why is it important to know your audience?
- Why waste time communicating with someone else?
- Talk to people who you’re relevant to
- Every business exists to serve people; even if you’re B2B
What are mistakes businesses make with their audience?
- Thinking everyone is their audience; the more focused, the better
- Not fully understanding their audience; don’t make dumb assumptions
- Not staying focused on the audience; it’s not about you, it’s about them
How can we figure out who our audience is?
- Think about the people you serve? Who are your best customers?
- Figure out what they have in common; usually it’s the problem you help them solve
- Talk to some of them; learn about their motivations and preferences
- Look at your website users, social media followers, email subscribers
- List the demographic data; gender, age, location, income, occupation, family, etc.
What are the practical ways of staying focused on your audience?
- Creating audience personas is a helpful shortcut to processing this mass of information
- It focuses your attention on a specific character, rather than on statistics
- It’s OK to have a few different personas based on different audience segments
- Print these out and keep them visible as a reminder for who you’re reaching
- Think about the persona every time you write an email, social post, or blog
- But don’t overly generalize; keep meeting with people to keep it human
