Knowing Your Audience

Marketing is the ultimate tool for anyone looking to increase the profits, attention and stature of their business. That’s all well and good if you don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s also crucial to understand just who your audience is. Who are you trying to reach and appeal to? Knowing your audience is important. If you don’t know who you’re posting to, you shouldn’t be marketing at all! So how do you go about figuring out who your audience is?

If you’re just starting out, figuring out who your audience is from the get-go can be tough if you don’t have the clients or traffic to help be a stepping stone. Figure out what exactly your business is, and what it does. Who, from the standpoint of what exactly your business is, do you sell your business too? If you’re a company like us, you sell video to industrial companies. There, that’s your audience. You may think that that is your audience, and it will be, but when it comes to marketing it is a lot deeper than this. Do you have different types of products, and do they maybe attract sub-audiences more than others under that industrial company bracket? You need to pick apart your audience a lot, to understand who exactly you need to broadcast to.

A good way to dig deeper is to utilise your analytics as much as you can. You know who your on-the-surface audience is but analysing your analytics can help you understand them a little more. Where are they from for example, are they all UK based or do you have international traffic? What age ranges are your audience, and what gender do they belong to? Are they more casual phone viewers, or are they in an office using a computer? Break it down, understand who your target audience is and who perhaps isn’t on your radar who are looking at your company. These are all the people you want to be marketing too, and understanding this will made your marketing strategy more refined.

When it comes to the marketing strategy, and you have your audience in mind, how exactly should to be marketing your content to them? Well, it depends on what the content is. If you’re using e-mail marketing, most platforms like Mailchimp that help you do this allow you to create multiple audience lists to send e-shots to. This is the perfect way to filter your audience and designate posts to them. But if we’re talking about your average social media post, this may be a little tricky. Everyone in your circle will be able to see what you post unless you don’t let them, so targeting one specific part of your audience here can be difficult. This isn’t a bad thing however.

Whether this circle fits into your niche audience you’re targeting or not, it doesn’t matter. Your reach is extending, and that will only help to add to your audience. So ultimately, even if your post is tailored to a specific group of people, anyone else seeing it will be aware of your presence and may even keep you on their radar, if they think your company may fit the bill at some point. Of course, if your post is targeted towards someone specific, make it so, don’t try to appease everyone.

Finding out who your audience is from actually speaking to them sounds obvious, but it can really help to fine tune your marketing in the future. If you get an enquiry, find out what they saw or how they found you and use that to form your marketing plan. Did they see a specific post or use a specific Google search term to find you? That will help you understand what you need to change or what you need to keep up doing with your marketing to keep that audience coming in, knowing your audience is crucial but building upon that audience is even more so.