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1 minute read
Hear me out for a second…
I cut my teeth in media agencies doing strategy consulting for clients.
I used to spend hours in Roy Morgan defining a target audience based on what a business said they wanted, or what they were selling, or what research they’d already done.
I was lucky, taught by industry veterans who knew what they were doing.
In subsequent agencies I worked for, strat decks to clients needed to be turned around so fast there wasn’t the time to spend hours researching and defining target audiences. We had to assume the client had done that work. Our job was to build a media strategy that would reach and convert the target audience we were given.
My eventual move to client-side revealed that ‘the work’ that I thought was happening in the background before a brief hit an agency, was wobbly, at best.
I hit the lucky pot again though, having the opportunity to do the Marketing Week Mini MBA in Marketing with Mark Ritson.
One of the things he drummed into us was ‘marketers do not know or understand their target audience’. And if we argued and said - Yes, actually we do… because we are a customer, or we belong to that audience, or we have data on x,y,z… he’d remind us that we knew shit.
It was an important and humbling lesson to take on board. Because if we think we already know something, then our curiosity to keep learning and do the right work to find the real answers disappears.
Plus, if we think we already understand them, then we can fall into the trap of thinking that they’ll give a hoot about our amazing product or even worse, our marketing.
They don’t… they’re way too busy living their lives to care.
Without doing proper diagnosis (love the infographic shown from The Proper Marketing Club), we as marketers can’t assume we will really understand our target audience. Not enough companies or marketing teams spend time on the diagnosis steps illustrated. So when you get to market segmentation, targeting and positioning, you’re missing depth of understanding.
So if you haven’t done diagnosis, don’t kid yourself that you know your target audience.
