For retail-based businesses and others, it’s important to have a deep understanding of a specific target audience. Without identifying your target brand audience, companies are likely to create more generic advertising and marketing campaigns that don’t resonate with prospects. If you can take the time to learn about who your audience is and what they want, you can more precisely target your ads and other content to speak more directly to them.
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Why You Need to Know Your Target Brand Audience
What you know about your target brand audience will give you guidance when it comes to your strategy and marketing plan. While many advertisers may simply want to maximize their reach and connect with as many people as possible, it’s best to target specific segments to drive more engagement and higher conversion rates.
Keep in mind that in today’s environment, people are inundated with so many ads to the point where they experience a phenomenon known as ad fatigue. The average person encounters anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day. That’s thousands of brands competing for people’s attention when they only have so much attention to spare. If you want to stand apart, you need to know who to target and how.
Through highly targeted campaigns, you’ll be able to more effectively communicate with audiences and connect with the right people at the right time. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most from your budget with minimal waste while increasing ROI through stronger connections.
Steps for Identifying Your Target Brand Audience
If you want to make sure you’re targeting your audience and reaching the right people with your campaigns, the following are some steps you can take to identify your audience and build client profiles. In doing so, you’ll be able to hyper-target your ads and marketing content to build relationships with prospects and increase conversions.
Look at Your Current Customer Base
The very first step you should take is to take a close look at your existing customers. You can do so by looking at which offerings are currently your most popular and collaborating with both sales and marketing teams. Your sales staff will likely have first-hand experience speaking with and getting to know customers, meaning they can offer more insight into what your audiences want.
You can also ask your customers directly about their experiences, wants, and needs using customer surveys. This can not only provide you with valuable feedback, but it can also show your current customers that you truly value them. You can also connect with your social media followers to find out what they want from the perfect brand.
See What Competitors Are Doing
Don’t just look inward—check out what your competitors are doing. Find out specifically who your competitors are targeting, their current customers, and their offerings. You might find that your competitors aren’t addressing a certain pain point or offering features that you can give to your competitors’ audiences. Competitors may also neglect certain segments of your shared audiences that you might find to be worth targeting.
By looking at your competitors, you can determine what to incorporate into your own strategy based on what’s working and what isn’t for them.
Conduct Other Market Research
In addition to looking outward at your competitors, you should look at the industry at large to further identify any gaps that you can fill with your offerings. Take a look at the market and see what’s currently trending. What do people enjoy and what features are they looking for? How can you meet these needs with your products or services?
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Consider the Value Your Offerings Bring
To better identify who can benefit from your products, you need to consider the specific benefits your offerings already provide. Think about the various features and the overall value that you offer, and then consider who would benefit from them.
For example, you might have a blog on your website that covers a wide range of topics. You might display certain expertise within a particular niche that’s worth exploring. You may also offer an app with a specific feature that makes it more accessible than other apps in the same category. There are many ways to go about determining what value you offer compared to other brands.
As the benefits your offerings provide come to mind, create a list of them. You can then make a list of individuals who have a specific need that you can meet with each benefit. This will help you match each offering or feature with a specific problem that different audience segments may have.
Determine Who to Target Based on Demographics
Once you’ve determined what benefits you offer and what types of customers will want them, you can start painting a picture of the specific people who are most likely to become customers. When identifying these potential audiences, there are many traits to consider. You’ll want to look at a variety of demographics.
For example, you may look at factors such as age, gender, location, education, income level, occupation, marital status, and what a typical day looks like for them. Additionally, you’ll need to take a look at how your target brand audience behaves and thinks, which can further help you figure out how best to target it. To gauge your audience’s behavioral traits, you may look at each segment’s personality, values, lifestyle, attitudes, and interests.
With all of this information about your audiences, you can better decide how to connect with prospects. You’ll be able to determine how your offerings fill in the missing puzzle piece of their lives.
Apart from demographics and psychographics, you should also pinpoint where your audiences spend their time. Do they browse certain types of websites? They may spend a lot of time on social media. If so, you should identify which specific channels they spend their time on, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or another site. Your audiences may also watch a lot of TV or streaming services, or they may read magazines or other print media.
Develop Buyer Personas for Each Audience Segment
Based on the demographics and other aspects of your audiences, divide them into different segments. From there, you can begin developing buyer personas that exemplify each audience segment.
A buyer persona is a representation of a particular type of person in your audience. It helps businesses perceive audiences as a single identifiable person they’re trying to reach, as opposed to a more faceless group of people. A buyer persona may have a unique face, name, and narrative to connect them to a specific segment and make them feel like an actual person that you can connect with through your content.
When creating a buyer persona, start with the defining characteristic. For instance, your persona may represent a segment comprising busy professionals. In this case, you may come up with a name like Professional Pat, which could help connect a name to the occupation. In addition, you can put a face to the name, whether you draw the person, use a stock photo, or take a picture of someone else who’s willing to represent this segment.
Next, come up with a story behind this persona. What do they do throughout the day and what is their schedule? What specific problems do they encounter in their daily lives and what are they looking for to help resolve those problems? How might they encounter your brand at a certain point throughout the day? What steps do they take to research a brand or offering? By answering these and other questions, you can develop this persona’s unique story.
Keep in mind that you might only start out with a few buyer personas, depending on the size of your initial target brand audience. Over time, you might discover other segments worth targeting, especially if your offerings expand. In this case, you can add personas over time, and you can even make changes to existing ones if your existing segments evolve.
Use Your Personas to Guide Your Campaigns
With your buyer personas developed, you can begin developing ads based on where you’re most likely to reach your target brand audience. Knowing what each segment responds to can inform your creative elements, including visuals and messaging. This will help hyper-target campaigns.
You can also begin collecting more data about your customers, which can help you continually learn about your audiences and improve your campaigns. To help determine which campaigns work best, you can also use A/B split testing to figure out which content resonates the most.
Know Your Target Brand Audience to Drive Engagement and Conversions
By learning as much as you can about your target brand audience, you’ll be able to target them more effectively with content that connects with them the right way and at the right time. As a result, you’ll be able to increase brand awareness, trust, engagement, and ultimately conversions and sales.
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