The Importance of Knowing Your Audience
Understanding your audience’s needs
When you’re experiencing something difficult, it can be very helpful to talk to someone who understands what you're going through. That’s because feeling understood is critical to our emotional well-being as well as the health of our relationships.
This applies to your relationship with your customers as well. If your audience doesn’t feel truly understood by your brand, your relationship will suffer.
To make your customers feel like your brand truly understands them, you first need to know your audience. Knowing your audience inside and out is crucial to successfully building a lasting relationship because it allows you to tailor your marketing and brand design directly to your customers.
What is a target audience?
The first step to knowing your audience better is identifying your target audience. This is the group of customers who want your products or services. They are the people who are most likely to seek out and ultimately purchase your offering.
The parameters you use to define your target audience are up to you. Some companies will use demographic information like age, gender identity, career type, and more to define the group of people they serve (i.e., working moms, ages 24-36). Other brands will opt for a description of the kind of person who faces a particular problem (i.e., working moms who are exhausted from juggling all their tasks).
Defining your target audience
When defining your target audience, it’s important to be specific. The more narrowly you can define your target audience, the better. You might think that your product or service is “for everyone," but it’s usually not. A more useful strategy is to pick a niche audience that you can focus on. As your company grows, you might create more products that work for new audiences. Worry about that later. For now, focus on being the brand that serves just one audience niche.
When it comes to figuring out what narrow audience you want to serve, it’s a good idea to use data. We’ll get into this more below, but be sure you don’t define your target audience based on who you think your product is for. Instead, try to find out who is actually buying your product. When you do this, your target audience will be constantly evolving as you get more data.
To make it easier for your team to visualize your audience, it’s a good idea to create an audience persona (or multiple personas!) to embody the characteristics of your target audience. An audience persona is a fictional representation of your perfect customer. Filling in details about the persona makes the target audience feel more realistic and comprehensible. For example, instead of trying to create an ad that appeals to working moms, you could create an ad that would appeal to your audience persona Jennifer, who works in accounting, has three children, a house in the suburbs, etc. It’s much easier to imagine speaking to a personified version of your audience than to envision a faceless demographic.
Why it’s important to know your audience
Knowing your audience matters because you should be shaping your entire brand and marketing strategy around them. How you define your brand voice, your personality, your website design, your social media pages, and more should all funnel back to your audience. If it doesn’t appeal to your audience, it doesn’t matter how good it looks or how great the words sound — it won’t work.
Knowing your audience doesn’t just help with branding and marketing, either. It also improves the other areas of your business, like product development, sales, and customer service. If you’re designing products with your audience in mind, they’ll feel heard and valued by your brand. If you’re approaching potential customers in a way that shows you understand their problems, they’re more likely to purchase from you. And if your customers are calling in to a support team that understands them, they’re more likely to walk away feeling like they had a great experience with your brand.
How to research your target audience
Once you’re ready to find your target audience, you’ll need to conduct market research in order to find out who your customers are and what they want. You’ll want to know things like where they live, how old they are, where they work, if they have kids, what they like to do in their free time, and anything else you can think of.
The more information you find, the more likely you will be able to find patterns that will be useful later. These patterns will become segments of your audience. Segments are groups of your customers that share similar demographics or traits.
You can conduct research by interviewing customers or hosting focus groups, searching for how audiences talk about your product in internet forums or on social media (also known as social listening), sending out surveys, or analyzing data (from Google Analytics to social media metrics and more).
How to use information about your audience to design your website and brand
To use the information you’ve learned from your audience to inform your brand design and marketing strategy, look at the patterns you identified in your audience research. These insights will guide your brand design. For example, if you discover that 75% of your current customers are parents, you might want to mention on your website how your product benefits families or feature brand photos of families.
For segments of your audience who share a trait that isn’t shared by the majority of your customers, you can use targeted marketing strategies (newsletter segmentation, landing pages) to personalize your branding and marketing communications to these groups’ unique needs/interests. For example, if you discover a substantial portion of your target audience lives in Chicago, you can create targeted campaigns just for those members of your audience in that location.
The big message:
Identifying and defining your target audience is a surefire way to uplevel your branding and marketing strategies. Your customers will feel better understood by your brand. As a result, they’ll be more likely to engage with your content and make a purchase from you.
Looking for help?
If you’ve been struggling with connecting with your audience, we’d love to help you. We offer strategy sessions to help uncover the issue and make suggestions for change to help you move the needle once again!
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