Target Audience: Make Sure You’re Hitting the Bullseye

When marketing your organization, it’s important to have a strategy for your marketing audience – both who they are and where they’re located. The best approach is to have a multi-platform strategy that reaches your target audience on several levels such as through print, video and digital advertising.

When deciding the best platforms to market your organization, it’s essential to understand the audience you’re trying to reach. Knowing your target audience will help you craft your marketing efforts to make the best connection. This will help with strategies for everything from using the right language for your audience to crafting the best visuals. This will also make you more efficient in creating content, designing ads and using your marketing budget.

Here are some tips to help ensure you’re reaching your desired audience at their level:

Know your clients

Take the time to research your current clients through surveys, demographic research and digital analytics. We’ve all wondered why companies make every effort to reach to new customers, while seemingly forgetting about their current ones. (I’m looking at you, cable companies). Studies show that 80 percent of your profits will come from 20 percent of your existing customers, so take the time to get to know them. Doing so may just transform them into your best referral sources.

Learn about your competition

Studying your competition will help you identify the gaps in the market. This will, also, help determine what you can do better. Research where your competitors are ranking under key research terms to help you build a stronger digital presence. This can help you decide on the best marketing strategies to set you apart from others.

Determine your target audience

Who are you trying to reach with your messaging? If you don’t make this decision, you could be wasting time, energy and budget on trying to reach everyone with little success. There are a variety of ways to facilitate this conversation but it is important one to have. You may be surprised at the answer. There is no way to please everyone with a particular marketing campaign, social media post or newsletter. However, you can craft these various elements to fit the needs of your desired audience.

Evaluate what’s important

Knowing what is important to your target audience can help you craft the best ways to reach them. In addition to learning the specific demographic breakdown of your audience, you also should learn about what they find important and interesting. This can help you create the right content and campaigns to ensure your audiences become and stay engaged with your message.

Create audience personas

Now that you’ve done all the research about your current customers and competitors and decided exactly who your audience is and what is important to them, you can begin to craft personas of the perfect clients. As you develop new content or campaigns, you can match those with these personas to ensure you’re meeting your audience’s needs.

As the world continues to absorb information at a faster pace, reaching your audience and keeping them engaged is more difficult than ever. The best way to do that is to know your targeted audience so you can fulfill their needs. If you’re having trouble doing this, Chartwell can help you decide who your audience is and the best ways to reach them.