Do you really know your target audience?

A s part of our engagement process with any new clients, we do what we call a Digital Audit, an exercise in which we take a closer look at the client’s target audience, competitions, brand positioning, business objectives, in order to come up with a holistic digital marketing strategy that aligns all the stars. Standard protocol.

One thing we notice time and again is that most clients don’t really know who they are selling to.

By knowing I don’t mean basic demographics like age, gender and income. I mean reeeeally knowing them: their hobbies, their values & believes, their concerns, and what makes them happy.

Why do we care? Because in today’s digital age, knowing only the demographic of your target audience is borderline irresponsible!

Demographics simply frame the market

You have to know the demographics. You’ve got to start somewhere, but you cannot stop there. With so much more data available on what people are doing in the digital space nowadays, options are available for us to target way beyond demographics in order to zoom into the bull’s eye of your market.

Interest drives click-thru and engagement

You really need to get to know your target audience’s interests. Dig deep into their lifestyle to learn about their hobbies, and conjecture about their value systems, concerns, lifestyle.

Why? Because most pay-per-click advertising platforms have an unassuming text box with the words “interests” and ‘behaviour” in there, and filling in this box correctly often makes or breaks your campaign.

Also digital marketing is all about content – relevant content, and you want to give your target audience content that excites them, so that they engage with your social media, open your email newsletter and click on your PPC (pay-per-click) ad.

Purchase funnel mindset closes the deal

Having a good understanding on what your target audience is thinking at various stages of the purchase funnel can help shape your search keyword strategy to effectively close-the-deal, which search is good at as a channel.

What are the different contexts of their needs? What adjectives do they use to describe what you have to sell/say? What words are often associated with your brand keywords? What’s your USP in their eyes?

As I often say in the class I teach, digital marketing is about nailing the long-tail, and finding your long-tail is about being relevant, and knowing what’s relevant is to know who they are (demographics), what they are interested in (interest targeting in PPC & social media), and how they purchase (search keywords).

It used to be difficult to know so much about your target audience pre-digital, but nowadays with analytics from all your digital channels (web, email, search, social), and free tools such as Google Keyword Planner, information about your target audience is literally at our finger tips (gosh, that sounds so 90’s).

Happy Digital Marketing!

Sincerely,
Patrick