Defining Your Target Audience

Creating your Audience Persona

Creating a detailed persona is a powerful tool to understand your audience that most businesses simply do not do. The whole point of creating these fictional characters is that it helps you visualise and empathise with your ICP. This makes it easier to create targeted marketing strategies for your audience.

• Persona Development: There is no “one shoe fits all” here, with that in mind, you’ll have to start by developing a few key personas that represent your main audience segments. Give each persona a name, age, occupation, and background story. Remember to include details about their goals, challenges, and preferences.
• Data Collection: Using surveys and analytics will help you to accrue more accurate details about your customers, with more data you’re more likely to be able to generate a more effective persona.
• Empathy Mapping: Creating empathy maps for each persona is often overlooked. These maps help one to understand what your potential personas think, feel, see, hear, and do. This exercise can provide highly valuable insights into their motivations and pain points.

The Role of Market Research

To understand insights into your audience’s needs, preferences and behaviours, it’s important to gather and analyse data on your ICP. Market research is what will play a critical role in doing just that. There are several ways this can be achieved. A brief overview includes:

• Questionnaires and Surveys: Quantitive data from a large audience can help provide insights into demographic preferences and behaviour
• Interviews and Focus Groups: Qualitative data such as interviews and focus groups, allow you to have direct interaction with your audience. This helps with your understanding of your audience’s motivations, emotions and behaviours.
• Analytics and Data Analysis: Something many companies can often do quite badly is to use the data that they have, such as the data from Google Analytics or their social media analytics and the data on their CRM. Analysing your analytics can help identify patterns and trends.
• Competitor Analysis: One form of market research often overlooked is studying ones’ competitors, understanding what they are doing to reach and engage with their audience can often provide valuable insight in optimising your market research.

How to Apply Audience Insights 

Strategically gathering data about your Analysing it he’s only part of the process next one will have to apply these insights to one’s marketing strategy. There are many ways of doing this. I shall list a few.

• Contact Creation: Telling your content to address specific pain points that your audience has we most likely see the engagement or time spent on your block so your social media updates your videos are improved dramatically.
• Personalisation: Small tweaks to your email marketing campaigns such as using your audiences name when recommending products based on past purchases or creating targeted marketing messages more relevant and personalised to your audience.
• Segmentation: Smaller segmentations on your audience allow you to further personalise your marketing efforts. This will allow you to have the ability to create more targeted and effective marking campaigns.
• Customer Journey Mapping: this is often overlooked. By identifying and analysing key touch-points and interactions that your customers have with your brand, can help you with insights such as, where you’re losing potential customers, and where (platform/content) the majority of your customers come from. You can then double down on your winning channels and amend your losses in tactics that are performing poorly.

The benefits of defining your target audience:

There are a number of benefits to defining your target audience:

• Increase engagement: creating content and messaging that solves your audience’s pain points can lead to higher levels of interaction in your content such as shares leading to conversions
• Improved customer satisfaction: you can achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, by showing your audience that you understand their needs and preferences and that you can provide products and services that meet their expectations
• More effective marketing: let’s face it generic marketing campaigns perform poorly, whilst targeted marketing campaigns are much more effective. By focusing your efforts on the right audience, you will achieve better results & lower your marketing costs.
• Competitive advantage: Let’s face it the one fundamental way to differentiate your brand and create unique value propositions that appeal to your audiences can be achieved by understanding your audience. This is what can give you a competitive edge.