Who are you speaking to with your marketing? What do they want? How do you show them you’re the one they should go to?
These are all questions you need to know the answers to before kick-starting your marketing campaigns, creating content of any kind or even starting a business in the first place. People often talk about ‘knowing your target audience’, but that doesn’t just mean knowing whether they’re Englishmen in their twenties or retired American women. It means understanding them.
Sure, you need to identify basic demographic information such as gender, age, location, income, job title, ethnicity, etc. But you also need to know what the people you’re marketing to want, need and do. Building on that, you need to know how to effectively appeal to them. Here are three key steps to finding, understanding and appealing to your target audience…
Identify
It’s only the first step (although it’s where many marketers stop), but it’s critical you clear this first hurdle. The question is “who are we selling to?” and if you get it wrong then all the rest of the steps – no matter how well executed – will be running down the wrong path.
You always have to start by identifying your ‘target market’, which is a broader group of people interested in your product, such as avid readers being interested in your book shop. This might seem very obvious, but even these consumers are worth investigating further. For example, if you exclusively sell women’s clothing, you might think gearing all your marketing towards women makes perfect sense.
But what about birthday gifts? What about seasonal marketing aimed at male friends, family & partners? You could be missing out on a huge opportunity if you don’t consider how you’ll reach fathers, sons, brothers, husbands and so on. Then again, you’ve got to figure out whether this is an area worth investing in, and there are ways to do this.
One fantastic way to attain the data you need to identify your target audience and guide your marketing effectively is carrying out surveys. For example, assuming your database is built on existing customers, you could include the question of “Roughly what percentage of your clothes were given as gifts?”. You could then align the fraction of your marketing dedicated to gift buyers with that survey figure and avoid missing the opportunity or wasting marketing resources. Marketing Evolution gave a fantastic example of how Old Spice did exactly that in this article.
If you’re starting a new business, market research is always worth conducting to get a feel for the interest in your product/service offering. You can get a feel for aspects like pricing, purchasing habits and shopping preferences (online vs in-store, importance of delivery time, etc.) and align these with personal details like age & gender of the respondents. This can be used to build a strong picture of your target audience and leverage it in your marketing. If you’re opening a cafe and the majority of your respondents said they feel coffee is too expensive, you can make low pricing a focal point in your marketing.
Understand
Understanding the situation of a consumer can be difficult because you’re essentially trying to empathise with strangers. While you can’t sit down and talk to each individual, it is possible to take the temperature of a relevant demographic to your target audience. If you sell to young adults in the UK, demonstrating that you empathise with the difficulty of buying property in the current economic climate shows that you care. This applies very strongly to B2B marketing when offering a solution to a problem for a target audience; showing an understanding of their business’s situation before moving onto how you can help. We actually explored this technqiue in depth in our most recent blog post.
Another level to understanding your target audience is understanding their role in the buying process. This is a well-known component of marketing to children’s products. Since you know a young child can’t go out and buy your product themselves, they essentially become a vehicle to reach the purchasers (their carer). So, ‘click here to get yours’ becomes ‘tell your mum/dad to get yours here’.
Appeal
You might know that your content is aimed at people specifically in Liverpool, so you’ve tailored your references (saying “you can find our shop on Penny Lane” rather than talking about the one on Bond Street) to the local area. But have you considered the cultural differences? The dialect, the socioeconomic climate, the prevailing mindset of the locals. It’s no use trying to relate to Liverpudlians by talking about the London Underground and £5 lattes.
In fact, even the language you use should be tailored to your audience; being wary not to isolate inexpert consumers with complex industry terms or appear callow to consumers with expertise in the field. This final area is most applicable to the difference between B2C & B2B marketing, as consumers tend not to be experts in the product/service they’re purchasing, whereas a business is much more likely to be and will expect you to prove that you are also an expert.
Three key steps summarised
- Identify your target market and demographics, then hone in on your target audience
- Understand the situation of your target audience and how this impacts their wants & needs
- Appeal to them with an effective approach by utilising the information you’ve learned in the previous steps to tailor your content
If you found this article helpful, why not get in touch with KAYBE and find out how else our team of experts can help you grow your business and appeal to your target audience?