It’s necessary to know your target audience. There is no way around it.
Imagine: You’ve asked someone on your team to revive the blog by writing a few posts for your target audience. In response, the staff member asks you if there’s anything they should know before writing. You tell them to reference the company documents and to use their own instincts. Then, they ask you the most important question of all:
Who is the target audience for the blog posts?
Regrettably, you have no clue; you don’t know who the blog posts are for. So, you answer, “Everyone”.
I hate to break it to you, but that answer is a sign of trouble. When you don’t know your target audience, you pay for it in lost opportunities and wasted resources.
As I mentioned earlier, it is necessary to know your target audience. There is no way around it. Your company or organization doesn’t achieve success with guesswork every time.
Here are three reasons why you need to know your target audience:
1. You reach the right people
“Everyone” is not your target audience. Casting such a wide net doesn’t bring you closer to knowing what your target audience wants. It does the opposite. It can misconstrue your communications efforts. For example, using “everyone” as your target audience online can be a reason why social media is not working for you. Why? You won’t know because you don’t have a specific idea of who was engaging with your brand to begin with. In other words, you won’t know if you reached the right people.
Say you try to run a contest on Twitter and it yields many likes and retweets. You go to your analytics and see who has engaged with the content. However, you see a variety of profiles and interests among the group, and you’re unsure about what they all have in common. When you don’t have a reference point for your target audience, these analytics are hard to make sense of.
Specific information yields specific results. Those results are the people who are actually looking for your content. These are the right people, and you should always pay attention to them. They are the ones most likely to engage with your content because they have an investment in it; they want answers to their problems. Your organization’s job is to continue bringing them value so that they can convert that investment into whatever you want it to be, such as a sale or a sign-up. This is why you need to know your target audience: It positions you for a win!
Tip: Create quick and easy user personas to consolidate your customer insights.
2. You send the right messages
How do you know when someone is talking to you in person?
They face you, make eye contact and address you by name, right?
It’s the same concept in communications. After you’ve reached the right people, you want to send the right messages so that they stay engaged with your brand. The purpose of messaging is to inform your target audience on what your brand is really about.
The wrong messages will make the wrong impressions.
The wrong impressions will make it less likely that people invest in your organization.
Say you started a newsletter and want to get more sign-ups. You found the right people online to reach out to. However, the only message you’ve sent is for people to sign up to your newsletter. That sounds…normal, right? But if that is the only message that your organization is sending, what does that tell your target audience? It tells them that promotion and sales are the most important thing in your organization.
In other words, you haven’t given your target audience a reason to sign up for the newsletter, just reasons that you’ll benefit from it.
It’s simple – people want reasons to trust your brand. Show your target audience what your business is about so that you can send a clear message about why they should invest.
Tip: Use social listening techniques to better understand what your target audience cares about.
3. You know your target audience and their problems
There are very few inconveniences that rival asking a question in a search engine and getting results that don’t answer it.
Moreover, the fast pace of the digital era now makes finding the wrong solutions a huge time waster.
It’s the same thing with content on websites, social media etc. People search for content all the time. So, if they can’t find what they’re specifically looking for, it’s likely that they’ll leave and disengage.
Say you run a business that reviews edtech tools and shares insights about the industry. You put up a new blog post on your website and the title is “10 ways to optimize edtech in your classroom”. However, the content just lists 10 tools your business recommends to use in the classroom.
It’s likely that people would get frustrated quickly. Why? Because you’ve shown them that your business values sales more than value to the point where you’re willing to mislead them.
People want to know that they’re valued customers. Think of it like this: would you want to engage with someone who only comes around when they need something from you? Would you call that person a friend? Probably not. So, it’s best to provide valuable and relevant content to your target audience so that people trust your brand enough to refer to it when there are problems.
Tip: Use simple surveys to gain more insight about your customer’s goals, problems and needs
Start here: https://www.hotjar.com/blog/website-survey-questions/
Over to you
This seems like a lot of work that has to be done frequently and for a long time. It is. However, to be frank, there is no skipping this step. It’s what makes great content stand out from good content. Even if you don’t have a dedicated staff person or freelancer to do this work specifically, there are ways to get the process started (See the tips above).
Most importantly, start with where you are and what you have. It’s more productive to use what you have at your capacity than to burn yourself out trying to do something else. No solution to better understanding your target audience is one-size-fits-all. So, try something and see what happens. After all, that’s the way to move forward.
Still stuck? Contact me today.