Six Steps To Understanding Your Target Audience.

Your target audience should be at the front of your mind whenever you are creating content. But do you have a clear profile on who your target audience are?

Having an insight in to your audience lets you tailor your communications specifically for them and create eager leads. Here are a few things to think about when creating your audience profile.

Step 1: Who are they?

The first step to understanding your audience is – unsurprisingly – to identify who they are. Building up an audience profile based on demographics is a great way to start developing insights into your audience’s lives. And you don’t need to know everything about them. For example, You might know that a large percentage of your customers are young single women living in London and another large percentage are older women with children living in the home counties. From these two simple insights, we can already start to see that it’s important to tailor our communications with these audiences members differently. They are in different need states. Breaking your audience down further with anything else you know about them only helps you get closer to finding out exactly what they need from your company and how best to communicate with them.

Step 2: How can you help them?

Your current customers are only customers because once they had a problem that they came to you to solve. Finding out what that problem was and why they came to you helps you find other people who might be in a similar need state.

Step 3: Where are they looking?

Communication is key. Understanding where your target audience is most receptive to company communications should be a crucial part of your strategy. Aiming at 18-25 year old? Maybe you should send them a text. Research shows that they send and receive around 128 SMS’s a day. Targeting the over 60’s? Maybe thinking about sending them a Facebook Message. 43% of them have made the switch to Facebook Messenger. over 500,000 over 55’s joined the Facebook in the UK last year alone. You can also tailor your comms based on the platform or messaging services. Keep SMS’s punchy and maybe throw in an emoji. Facebook can be a bit more fun, users are looking to be distracted.

Step 4: What turns them off.

Day to day we are saturated with companies advertising services and products and making huge fantastical claims and we’ve all become pro’s at tuning them out. We are all, let’s face it, a little jaded when it comes to company comms. We’re all hyper aware that we live in a world of small prints If you can make an impressive claim, you better back it up. The more proof you can put into your comms, the more eager your leads will be to convert into customers.

Step 5: Who influences them?

Maybe it’s celebrities, maybe it’s industry experts or maybe it’s just simple customer testimonials and reviews. Find out whose opinion your target audience trusts when it comes to making purchases or signing up to services and get them in your comms as much as possible.

If your target audiences is heavily influenced by celebrity culture, think about instagram indorsements. If they are influenced by a particular industry website, pitch them an article. Get your product in the hands of people they admire and you will create eager leads. 

If you creating comms and ads for online, you need to be taking advantage of niche marketing. Finding out where your audience get their news, style inspirations or advice is key when deciding where to play your product. A basic knowledge of your target audiences browsing habits allows you to create hyper targeted content. It’s the online equivalent of showing up at there house with a hoover, the moment theirs breaks.

Step 6: Be aware of your competitors.

Rarely will you be the only person on the market offering your product or services. Ask yourself what it is specifically about your brand that makes it such a good match for your target audience and make sure that feature is front and centre of your comms. If you are can’t answer that question, you’ve got the wrong target audience or your product isn’t right yet. Only start creating comms when you’re confident your product and target audience are a perfect match.

Have you read?
World’s Best Universities For Oil, Gas, And Petroleum Engineering In 2017
Best Medical And Pharmacy Schools In The World, 2017
World’s Best Schools For Online MBA Programs, 2017
Best Film Schools In America For 2016
The Best Music schools in the world, 2016