Can you imagine what it would be like without a target audience for your brand?
We know the answer to that—it would be pretty much impossible to gain any success! Without a set group of consumers to market your product or services to, you won’t have any idea who you should be targeting. That means that your marketing and branding strategies won’t have any focus on them, and you could end up firing wildly into the dark.
That will mean very limited sales!
However, researching who is using your brand and using this information to define your target audience isn’t usually enough. You will also need to put some effort into targeting this group of consumers too.
Once you start to define and target your target audience, you should find that converting leads and making those all-important sales becomes a whole lot easier. That’s largely because you are pushing your brand campaigns right in front of those people who are most likely to want to buy your products or services.
Ready to start aiming for your audience? Here are the five steps you need to take!
1. Do Some Brainstorming
What do you already know about the people who are using your brand? Take the time to write down a few shared characteristics that pop out to you. Perhaps all of your customers seem to be the same age, based in a similar location, or are on the same salary scale.
It’s also worth considering the day-to-day challenges that they face and what their shared wants and needs are. Brainstorming all of this should help you see what kind of marketing will resonate the most with your audience.
2. Use a Brand Tracker
Use a brand tracker like Latana or similar brand monitoring tool. These online resources are a great way to find key data on your target audience.
Firstly, the insights from the tracker will show you whether your audience has actually heard of you. If not, then at least you can get to work on changing that.
If they do know about you, then you can check the data to see how they view your brand and if they would consider using you in the future. What’s more, brand trackers will also show you data for your competitors and how you compare to them.
Many brands often stumble upon some small audiences that they didn’t even know they appealed to. There’s so much you will be able to discover when you look into brand-tracking data!
3. Consider Your Target Audience’s Persona
Everyone in your target audience will share a lot of characteristics. If you use all of these features to come up with a persona for your target audience, you and your team will have a much clearer idea of the type of person you are targeting with your ads and marketing.
Let all of your branding team know the type of individual they need to target. Then everyone will have the same type of person in mind when they are developing ideas and implementing new strategies.
For example, you can try customizing your product packaging. The container doesn’t just keep the item safe during shipping, but it can be used to create a good first impression on your customers. A box that’s uniquely designed helps shape the perception that your product has high quality and value.
4. Start Targeting Your Audience
Now you should have everything you need to start targeting your audience!
The best way to start it to implement your campaigns using channels that they use the most. For instance, if you are targeting millennials, then it is worth investing in YouTube adverts and social media advertising. Whereas brands that are targeting older generations should use a lot more TV and newspaper ads. You can always headstart with Facebook ad targeting, which is budget-friendly and provides good insights on what and where your audience sits and looks for. Another good way to analyze your audience is to map out your existing excel data to identify past trends to see what insights can be extracted.
5. Keep on Monitoring Your Work
Just because you’ve done the above four steps, there’s no reason to put your feet up! You will need to make sure that all of your hard work is actually paying off.
Keeping track of your brand and monitoring its health should make it easy to see whether all of your targeted promotions and campaigns are actually paying off.
One other reason why it’s so important to keep one eye on your target audience and any targeted efforts is that your audience might actually change over time. Your brand might start appealing to a different group or your usual audience might simply grow up and their preferences might change.
When you follow all five steps above, you might uncover information about your target audience that you weren’t originally aware of. And you can never know too much about those who are using your brand.
Harness as much brand-tracking data as possible, and you’ll find that knowledge really is power!
