Key to Marketing: Know Your Audience

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Do you know your audience? If you have a product, service, company of any kind, this is an important question to ask yourself. Knowing the answer to this question well can be a determining factor in your future success. Knowing your audience can help you make more-informed marketing decisions, gain meaningful feedback from people who represent your market and help you make changes to your company to fit their needs.

If you don’t know your audience, it’s time to either find out who it is or select one.

Identify Your Audience

If you’re a traditional brick and mortar type business, you may have some geographical restrictions to who your audience is. The coffeeshop in downtown Boise, Idaho probably doesn’t need to try and get in front of people in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Some questions you could ask yourself to help in this process could be the following:

  • Who do we want to buy our products?
  • Who do our products appeal to?
  • Do people in [insert demographic] have a need for our services?

Try to Understand the Way Your Audience Thinks

Once you’ve identified who your market currently is or who you’d like it to be, you need to try and understand what motivates them to make consumer decisions. To understand this, however, you would need to closely monitor their behavior on social media–what do they like, what kind of adverts upset them, and what are their previous purchases. These insights can be acquired by using the Adverity data analytics platform (adverity.com) integrated with the right analytical tools that make use of predictive analysis. Once you have the information about your audience, you would be able to create marketing campaigns that can bear fruitful results.

Car brands selling minivans often appeal to the safety of their vehicles because they know their target audience is primarily women. But how do they know this? Of course, it is because of data analytics, which enables marketers understand that women are motivated by a desire to protect their children. Truck brands often appeal to men’s masculinity in the same way. It’s a play to appeal to their pride but it often works. Sports cars often market to men and appeal to their pride saying that owning this particular vehicle is a thing of status and makes them look good to their peers. As soon as you understand the market, you can start sending interactive messages with vibrant content to your potential customers. You can do that with the help of SMS marketing platforms (such as those provided by Heymarket) that can engage your audience, enabling you to have meaningful conversations. Such platforms can also help you maintain close customer relationships with organized shared inboxes.

Make Sure the Way You Present Resonates

A brand that does this super well is MissionShoe. They sell shoes for male LDS missionaries and they really have their target market pinned down well. The users of their shoes are Mormon males ages 18-24. However, what MissionShoe knows is that these young men are often not the ones to make the purchases, it’s their mothers. So their messaging is all about the quality of their shoes and how that is going to lead to the best results for the boys who wear them.

Let’s walk through a couple examples of companies and consider who their markets/audiences might be.

A Pest Control Company in Minneapolis. This example can be really beneficial for you if you are planning to look for a pest control business for sale and starting up a franchise of your own. A pest control company would need to target a specific kind of customer base. Their audience would be residents within their determined distance from their office headquarters around the Minneapolis Metro area. Their primary audience is probably homeowners. To own a home, you generally have to be a bit older and established. Spending money to target teenagers would be a waste of money. The company could possibly cater their messaging to appeal to women. They could talk about the benefits of having a pest-free home and yard. They could simply appeal to the desire to know there are less creepy, crawly things around the home.

Similarly, depending on the type of business you are planning to start, the kind of audience you target will also change accordingly. Doing enough research about who will possibly need your services or products becomes important; understanding more about the target demographic, performing ample market research, and more, goes into successfully marketing your business and gaining more customers in the process.