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3 minute read
Having a business mission and purpose to solve a real customer problem or need is awesome… but how to go about communicating it effectively to your target audience in a way they’ll understand, resonate with and ultimately choose you?
You need to really understand your audience. Their behaviours, motivations, thinking processes.
Then you’ll be able to intercept them at the right time, in the right place with a message that resonates.
Here are three winning steps to understanding your target audience:
Ethnography
- This is the act of watching your target audience as they behave naturally and subconsciously. I touch on other research methods below, however most are asking the target audience to consciously think and answer questions about their behaviour. This is certainly valuable, but what people say and what they do without thinking first, can be two different things.
- If you have a retail-business, watch how your target audience interacts with your stores, your competitors' stores, the shopping centre or precinct. How do they move around? Are they purposeful or calmly browsing? What thoughts/opinions are they sharing with their friends or family as they move around that tells what they think about your store or products?
- If you’re a B2B company, ask to sit-in a clients’ office one day (perhaps offering a gift in exchange to sweeten the deal) to observe how your target audience goes about solving the problem your company solves for. How do they behave in general when going about their usual business day and what insights does that give you in how to position your business to them?
- If you have a digital product or service, consider installing heat-mapping and tracking tools on your website (Hotjar, CrazyEgg or something similar) so you can record and observe how people interact with your website, beyond what they simply click on.
Research
- If you work with a media agency or have access to a database like Roy Morgan or Ipsos data, you can replicate your target audience definition and run it against a variety of psychographic, purchasing, media and other categories to get under the hood of your audience's behaviours and attitudes.
- This data is built from survey responses and is therefore a reflection of how a person was feeling at the point in time they completed the survey. However, given the surveys collect data from thousands of people, the overall trends and averages of this data are reliable to work with.
- Running focus groups or your own surveys allows you to deep-dive into your target audience and weave in specific product/service-related questions, to ensure your business is delivering against a real customer need in a way that they will respond to.
- A/B or multivariate testing of digital ads and emails will give you more limited but specific data on which problem statements and solutions your target audience respond to most.
- Don’t forget competitor research to see what others are doing to solve the same problem, how their customers seem to respond to them including what they’re posting online and how people engage with them, where and what they’re advertising and any publicly available data or research about them.
Look to your customers
- If your existing customers are representative of your target audience you could also run focus groups, surveys or simpler questionnaires to help understand why they chose your business over competitors, and even better, understand what they love or hate about your product/service.
- Your customer base may not be representative of your target audience if you’re breaking into a new target segment or you attracted unexpected users from who you aimed to solve a problem for. This provides a wealth of insights in itself and may mean you need to go back to the drawing board on your target audience or even your product/service to resolve the mis-match and understand what that’s telling you.
Understanding your target audience beyond simple demographics will turbo-charge your marketing, allowing it to effectively and most efficiently hit your business objectives.
