Identify Your Audience, They Are Precious
How to always keep your audience in mind while marketing
To bring in customers, there is one marketing question that rules them all. One question to find them. One question to bring them all, one question to bind them.
Who is my target audience?
If you don’t know your audience, you get lost in the clutter and have to fight for their attention. Furthermore, once you finally get your audience’s attention, you need to know how they want to communicate with the product or service you offer. Your audience is precious and needs to be treated as such.
The Fat:
Who is Interested in Your Product/Service?
It is always nice to think that everyone who consumes your content, buys your product, or requests your service will think and act exactly like you do. However, in the world we live in, that is false thinking. Here’s a great case of a rookie mistake:
Shortly after Mountain Valley Marketing launched, we were approached by an old friend of one of the founders. He said, “so tell me about this business!” And man did I tell him about our business, in full unattractive and tedious detail. The kind of nerdy stuff that founders get excited about.
WRONG MOVE.
I got schooled for trying to sell the details of a very boring business to this potential customer. He did not really care about the finer points of SEO and content marketing, all he wanted to know was how it would help him grow an online business.
Luckily, I got a second chance to talk about our business. After hearing his story and identifying pain points for our potential customer, it became easy to see that we were a good fit to help his business without putting him into a detail-induced coma from information overload.
Always Keep Your Audience in Mind
We got a second chance with that customer, and we were lucky. The audience is precious, and you must foster good relationships with them by keeping your audience in mind at all times.
The most experienced marketers forget this from time to time. It’s hard to do every single day, especially if you have a varied audience. Remembering that you are not your audience was a point emphasized by Pulizzi and Rose when I brought up discussion about a difference in how our generations are using the features on Facebook. Find that conversation (which I am still ecstatic to have been a part of) at the 7:45 mark in the PNR: This Old Marketing Podcast 132.
If you DO NOT know your target audience, here’s what you should do:
- Identify who is already buying into your product/service/content
- Think about their stories and common problems you can help with
- Find out where they are in the buyer’s journey to know how to reach them
- Set guidelines for what your content and conversations will look like
Once you do these things, put them to practice on social media, blogs, in your emails, and in person. Your audience with thank you.
