who is your audience?

You don’t choose your audience; your audience chooses you. Too often, brands get caught up in marketing to who they want their audience to be that they ignore the people actually engaging with them. This leads to missed opportunities and wasted resources on campaigns that fail to resonate with their userbase. Today’s consumers inhabit increasingly personalized and curated spaces, making it vital that you understand who your audience is and who it isn’t. 

how do you find your audience? 

This is both the who and the where of your audience. Traditional methodology for identifying your target audience involves looking at traits like age, gender, income, interests, challenges, and goals, and identifying the overlaps. Knowing and understanding the demographics of your audience is useful for informing the backbone of your marketing strategy, but relying solely on demographics flattens your audience into statistics, ignoring the reality and context of their lives. 

The past few decades has reduced audience to where they are online; what their digital consumption habits are; who influences their digital purchasing… their user journey.  

But people are more than their digital behaviour. And demographics don’t dictate consumption or purchasing habits. To really tap into who your audience is and how to market your brand effectively, you need to understand their motivations, their pain-points, and their values. Obviously, it would be too time consuming to do in depth interviews with everyone who interacts with your brand, but there are tools that can help you build a more nuanced understanding of your consumer base. 

Market research gives you useful and actionable insight into why your audience behaves in certain ways and what they’re thinking when they interact with your brand. There are lot so ways to gather an analyze this information: 

• Social listening: analyzes and derives insight from the conversations and trends on social media relating to your brand, your competitors, and your industry as a whole. 
• Consumer feedback: provide your consumers with opportunities to talk to you directly through surveys, comment sections, and your social media channels. 
• Psychographics: analyzes the psychological and cognitive attributes of a consumer that reveals their beliefs, values, and goals. 
• Valuegraphics: a data-driven breakdown of the values that inform consumer decisions across global markets. 
• Market research: researching the on-the-ground realities for the audiences in your target markets provides you with context. Use this context to interpret how a marketing strategy comes to life through both national and localized lenses. 

By using a combination of the above, you can create targeted marketing campaigns that meet your consumers where they’re at, resonate with their own motivations and needs, and capitalize on behaviours their already engaging in.  

why is knowing who your audience is so important? 

Today’s consumers have grown increasingly accustomed to moving in intensely personalized and curated digital spaces. With the ability to filter out or unfollow things users are uninterested in, they’re more likely to choose brands that not only hold their attention but reflect their needs and motivations. Without thorough market research, you won’t be equipped to meet your audience where they are. Not only does solid research lend authenticity to your campaigns, but it’ll also help you keep pace with ever-evolving channels and markets and inform your brand’s growth. 

acquisition 

Brand awareness will only get you so far if you can’t inspire your audience to act. Understanding your audience’s thinking and decision-making process will allow you to present your brand as the easy/best choice. As equally important as knowing how to market to your audience is knowing where to market to them. Landscapes are constantly shifting, with new channels being created while others fall out of favour. Good market research empowers you to shift channels when your audience does and to be on the ground floor of emerging markets. 

loyalty and retention 

Your goal shouldn’t be just to convince consumers to buy your products or services once, but to think of your brand first when it comes time to make future purchases. Effective marketing cements your brand as the first and only choice. And when your brand is top of mind, word-of-mouth will do half your work for you, allowing you to focus more resources on growing your brand. 

growth 

Many brands make the mistake of cutting their marketing budgets, not realizing the full potential of their market research. This research doesn’t just tell you which marketing tactics will prove most effective, it informs you of what, exactly, your audience is looking for. You can apply this information to new and existing products to ensure that what you’re offering checks all the boxes for your target audience. When you know how to use marketing information well, your marketing budget pays for itself. 

let’s talk terminology 

When it comes to talking about market research, a lot of different terminology gets tossed around. So, let’s take a moment to go over some familiar terms, what they mean and how they differentiate from each other. 

segmentation vs. profiles 

Segmentation is a method of organizing your audience into groups based on psychographics or motivations for purchasing. This is more high-level research that is commonly done by firms who specialize in market research. Having this information will allow you to break your audience down into more manageable groups, make it easier to tailor dedicated marketing approaches for each.  

Consumer profiles personalize your segments, giving each a face. They’re a composite of all the human traits that exemplify each of your audience segments and ideally, localized to one of your priority markets. 

profiles vs. personas 

As mentioned above, consumer profiles are a way of putting a human face on audience segments. A good profile will be quite robust, combining customer pain points, interests, buying patterns, demographic data, motivations, and more into a more user-friendly format. Consumer profiles are useful at all levels of your marketing strategy. 

By contrast, personas are much smaller in scope. They’re generally applied to user experience on digital services or spaces. Personas are used to better understand user needs, behaviours, experiences, and goals. They’re more generic than profiles and represent different user types that might use a service, product, site, or brand. 

primary vs. secondary audience 

The difference between primary and secondary audiences comes down to who actually makes purchasing decisions. Your primary audience is the people buying your products or services. Your secondary audience is people who have influence over the purchases and are interested in your brand. An example of the primary/secondary audience dynamic is students (secondary) wanting to start the school year in brands that are on-trend, and their parents (primary) who are the ones doing the back-to-school shopping. 

target audience vs. target market 

When it comes to differentiating between target audience and target market, it’s a matter of scope or size. Target markets are a broad or large group of people your company wants to market to. The people who make up this group may only have one or two identifiers in common with each other. 

Target audiences, on the other hand, are smaller groups found within your target market. They will have a much higher degree of commonality, which lends well to targeted marketing approaches. 

Effective marketing campaigns rely on quality marketing research. You already know what you want to say, but how you say it and who you say it to are equally important. If you want to get more out of your marketing budget and are looking to supercharge your campaigns, then investing in getting to know who your audience is and understanding their motivations should be your first step.