To learn about your target audience is to set your business up for success.
Without knowing anything, you’ll likely experience challenges figuring out what to do and what not to do. Why?
Because your target audience is the centre of your business. What their pain points, challenges, wants and needs are inform how you reach them. Otherwise, the guesswork comes pouring in.
Suddenly, you have a campaign on your hands and you have no idea how your target audience perceives your social media presence, website user experience and even the website content. Furthermore, if something does work, you don’t know why nor what about it is resonating with your target audience.
This is why you need to learn about your target audience.
So how do you go about it?
Here are five easy ways:
Create surveys
Surveys are a great way to get to learn about your target audience. You can ask general or specific questions that give you insight into how your audience is experiencing your brand. It doesn’t have to be anything with fancy copywriting. It can be simple. Here are a few examples:
- How would you rate your overall experience on our website?
- How can we improve your user experience?
- When did you first hear about [insert your brand here]?
- How likely are you to recommend our product?
Resource: Hot Jar’s guide to website survey questions
Use social listening
Social listening is the act of monitoring and tracking things like keywords, mentions, engagement, topics, conversations and more related to your brand. Afterwards, you analyze these things for any useful insights or opportunities to take actions that help you achieve your business goals.
For example, let’s say you’re looking to start a campaign in the future on the topic of astrology, and you want to know what people are conversing about. You may start to track things like astrological signs, horoscopes, competitor apps and their creators, common hashtags and astrologers on social media. You would take all of this information and analyze it to understand what part(s) of your brand is resonating with your target audience.
This is how you learn about your target audience. You listen to them. Listening will lead you to making evidence-based decisions about how your campaign should read, look and feel.
Social listening is an act of patience. You may not get all of the answers in one day, one week or even a month. But taking the time is worth the rich information you’ll gain.
Resource: Hootsuite’s social listening 101 guide
Examine website analytics
Website analytics are a gold mine for information. They can help you identify what is working on your website in terms of:
- Views
- Engagement (e.g., actions completed such as calls to action)
- New visitors
- Bounce rates
- Session times
If you notice that your post about the best education technology products, for example, has the most views, you may start writing about topics around that to boost your metrics and give your audience what it wants.
All of this can help shape your content strategy as well as your general communications strategy. Furthermore, it help you pinpoint the how and why regarding your target audience reaching your website to begin with.
Resource: HubSpot’s beginner’s guide to website analytics
Check out your competition
Competition provides insight into your audience because of overlap. In other words, your brand probably has a similar audience to your brand competitor. Analyzing them can help you better understand why and how they’re reaching their audiences. Competition can also give you new ideas. What if your competitor tried something that worked or shifted their content strategy in a way that failed, for example? These are all insights that will help you understand your target audience.
Become your target audience
Everyone says that you aren’t your target audience. I used to say it because it’s true to an extent. For example, if you’re a well-paid CEO and your target audience is not, you are clearly not your audience. But in a lot of ways, we have many things in common with the audiences we want to reach. Why, you ask?
It’s important that we always try to understand our target audience, and understanding requires empathy. If we’re so unaware or too far away from the audience, we won’t develop any understanding about why they may do what they do. Instead, we may develop a robotic, unemotional tone of voice with them, which is off-putting no matter how fancy you get.
The bottom line is people want to relate to other people. I’m not suggesting duping your target audience and suddenly adopting a human voice for your brand to be relatable. What I suggest is making informed decisions about how best to speak to your target audience so that they are engaged meaningfully.
Over to you
Learning about your audience doesn’t need to be a hassle. Will it be easy? Probably not. It takes time and patience to develop a robust understanding of your target audience. Additionally, information will change over time. But sticking to it is the most important thing. The information you’ll gain is valuable to every part of your business, especially your communications work. So stick to it!
Resource: Copyblogger’s blog post about writers as part of their target audience
Ready to create a strategy to help you learn the most about your target audience?
Contact me and let’s get started.