The importance of defining your audience

Understanding your audience is a central piece of the marketing puzzle. It’s the legend for your marketing strategy, guiding what you say to whom and where. But how do you begin unlocking those answers and building a meaningful program that truly benefits your customers and earns their business?

Identify your perfect match

We start by asking senior leadership to help us define the attributes of an ideal customer. There are many definitions of “ideal,” but in most cases, we define an audience as desirable because it’s the most profitable, easiest to work with or an ideal, natural pairing that makes acquisition quick and easy. Once we identify audience priorities, we seek out additional internal resources, maybe 1-2 contacts in client services or sales, to validate this hypothesis.

Get to know your audience

Once you’ve solidified the two to three profiles you want to focus on, you’ll want to devote time to understanding this audience. Ultimately, you’re looking to collect four key pieces of information:

1. Demographic information, so that you can better target through paid media
2. Media consumption preferences – on a professional level as well as where they build personal community
3. Their goals and how success is measured
4. Their greatest challenges and barriers to achieving their goals

You’ll begin collecting this information from the people in your organization who work directly with your audience and understand their behaviors and motivations. But while you’ll be able to collect a lot of useful information from internal resources, the reality is that the best, most accurate information will come straight from the source.

You’ll want to use customer interviews as an opportunity to learn where they get news, how they learn new things and how they like to receive information, for instance via email, maybe through text or in a more reactive manner on social. Additionally, you’ll want to investigate their social media behaviors.

I have a saying: “one interview does not a persona make.” Be sure to speak with a few sources internally to identify trends and then use that information to inform customer interviews. In total, you’re probably looking at four to five interviews (from your internal and external audiences) per audience segment.

Audience insights play a central role in every piece of the marketing process – from strategy to message development, your platform mix and execution all the way through to promotion. Not only are they an excellent support tool as you begin selling a new strategy within your organization, but they’re the means by which you can provide meaningful impact with new and existing audiences.