Before you start any concerted marketing effort, you need to know who your audience is. Without a clear understanding of the market you're trying to reach, your messaging is unlikely to be aligned with their needs, and your goods or services won't be seen as the ideal solution.
In highly competitive industries and niches, your competitors likely have tightly defined target markets with a clear understanding of their pain points, values, and desired product features. That means your organization also needs to have a clearly defined audience that you know inside and out. Follow these four steps to identify and speak to your audience with greater success.
Define Your Audience
The first step in owning your audience is knowing who they are. Begin by generally researching the market that exists for products and services in your industry. If you have a landscaping business, for example, research local businesses in your area and see whom they're marketing to. If you sell online goods and services, find your competitors and see where they advertise and to whom their messages are directed.
If you have an established business, you can also research by looking through your own data. See who your biggest or more frequent buyers were. Whether you're using competitor research or your own sales data, identify the demographic characteristics of your target market: their age, gender, income, and other core factors.
Then you can develop more in-depth buyer personas, with fleshed-out details regarding where they spend time online, their interests, and their values. According to HubSpot, "Marketers today create content for multiple audience segments — marketing to three audience segments is most common."
Know What They Want
After you develop a clear understanding of who you're selling to, it's time to gain a clear understanding of who they want to buy from.
Consider factors such as:
- Pain Points: Consumers purchase goods that solve problems in their lives. They're not interested in products that don't address their needs or only partially provide what they're looking for. In hypercompetitive markets, shoppers can often find exactly what they're looking for without compromising.
- Language: Customer experience matters, so you'll need to choose styles and language that fit your target market. A consistent style guide helps you directly reach your target market with language they prefer, matches how they search in Google, and includes their understanding of a product or service.
- Brand loyalty: If you know what other brands your core audience already aligns with (which you might have added to your buyer persona), you can develop marketing campaigns that align with those products' brand identities. In doing so, you’ll attract, engage, and delight a target audience that keeps coming back.
Attract Your Audience
Now you know who you're marketing to and what types of messages or strategic approaches will work best. So it's time to put your marketing strategies into practice and test out how to attract an audience. From your buyer personas, you should already know what social media platforms and other channels (ranging from in-person to traditional broadcasting to digital channels) they prefer. Place your messages where your audience already spends their time.
Some options include:
- Posting promotional messages on your social media profiles or having paid advertising campaigns on a specific social media platform
- Sponsoring podcasts or radio shows
- Purchasing time on local news networks
- Having ads on streaming television services
- Having paid ad campaigns across websites and search engines
You need numerous touchpoints with your audience to shift from an unknown brand to a familiar sight before most consumers will buy from or even visit your online store.
Keep Audience Engagement High
Once you have captured your audience's attention, don't let it go. Constantly build up more touchpoints, so your brand stays top of mind and readers become more familiar with your products. That's how to build an audience that stays with you in the long term. Reaching and responding to consumers across multiple different channels creates a relationship with prospective buyers.
Ways you can do this include:
- Building an email marketing list so you can send warm and hot leads tailored messages based on their interests and behavior
- Responding to consumers on social media
- Creating retargeting ad campaigns so you can reapproach prospective buyers who didn't make a purchase the first time they visited your site
- Encourage shoppers to give feedback about their purchase
- Create marketing campaigns specifically for repeat customers.
By focusing on audience engagement, you can make your shoppers more attached to your brand. Engagement also shows you care enough to respond to them and keep the conversation going, making your brand more memorable and approachable for similar shoppers. You can also reach out to past customers to cultivate more sales and boost their lifetime value with open communication channels.
WNEM Marketing Is Here to Help You Own Your Audience
Identifying, understanding, and developing a relationship with your core target market is essential for building your business. At WNEM Marketing, our team of marketing experts is here to help every step of the way with market segmentation, audience build strategies, and campaign monitoring.
