Do you know who's buying your product or service?
Do you know how your audience(s) uses your product or service?
Do you have more than one audience?
An essential element to communicating is understanding who your audience is and defining them as accurately as possible. By identifying your audience and how they use your product or service, you can communicate the benefits of your offering in a very targeted way that will resonate with that audience.
When I started in advertising, one of my first assignments was to provide marketing, creative, and media teams with a complete description of our client's audience. In the 1980s, the only information we had was simple audience demographics.
Demographics
- Gender
- Marital Status
- Age Range
- Race
- Education
- Profession
- Household size
- Household Income
- Median Income
I took it one step further by building a visual board of people and lifestyle photos to help the marketing team, creative team, and media better understand the audience.
Today, an enormous amount of information is available through Internet research. There are sources of free demographic and psychographic data and data to purchase. Depending on your business, the Return on Investment of buying data may be significant. We are now building buyer personas and infographics that detail the ideal customer. The Persona includes demographics, behavior patterns, motivation, and goals. The more detailed the buyer persona, the better your chance of reaching and talking to your audience on their level.
The basics of marketing and reaching an audience have stayed the same since the beginning of modern marketing. Our ability to define our audience and create targeted, benefit-oriented messages has improved. The variety of vehicles for reaching individuals and businesses has increased dramatically. With Internet sites, targeted email marketing, and social media, we now have the opportunity to reach our audience and collect actionable data. We can track how individuals move through a website or the most popular vehicles by which they view information.
Defining your audience and creating a target-specific message through vehicles that reach that audience will differentiate you from the competition. If you have multiple audiences, develop messages that resonate with each one. Muddled messages risk not resonating with any audience. We have the tools, so it behooves us all to use them.
