Target Audience: Do you know yours?

How well do you know your target audience?

Businesses know they should be marketing to their existing and potential audiences but sometimes forget why and whom they are marketing to in the first place. 

This may seem like a bold statement, but I’ve often found myself on client calls hearing things such as, ​“Okay, we need to build a customer portal, deliver a nurture campaign, organise an event and promote it all on social media this quarter” and I think to myself, why? Where has this wish-list of deliverables come from? In fact, when the client is asked why?, it can sometimes be met with confusion and/​or silence. Usually, the reason for this is in the busy-ness of people’s working day and the desire to be doing the right thing, the delivery of activity, they have lost sight of their target audience and meeting that audience’s needs. Are all those deliverables necessary? Is there an approach that is better suited to the target audience and crucially for many clients, a more appropriate use of their budget? After all, unless you try different things, you may get the same results…

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”

Albert Einstein — ridiculously brilliant, over-quoted scientist and honorary marketer for the purposes of this blog. 

The ​‘blank sheet’ approach

What I like to do in this situation is to take a back-to-basics approach and rediscover who the target audience is and crucially why we are marketing to them. What are their needs, challenges, wants, and desires from both a personal and business perspective? This information can then be used to refocus the ​‘what’ regarding deliverables. Maybe a website isn’t necessary for a small but essential group of targeted influencers? Maybe some solid telemarketing followed up with a 1−2−1 knowledge share is a better use of budget and their time? Do they respond well to email or would an inbox messaging campaign on LinkedIn convert better? 

Even when this process has been completed right at the start of the project, are the answers still true half a year, even as little as a quarter year later? The key thing is to never assume you know everything about your target audience and it always pays to revisit this on a regular basis just to ensure your marketing strategy and approach is optimised to resonate with them, this helps keep your marketing efforts future-focused and ensure they evolve alongside the needs of your audience. 

Going through the exercise of defining and redefining your target audience (click here to read a great article from HubSpot on methods which help to define a target audience) means you will save in the long run, even subtle tweaks to messaging language or a creative visual based on new information about your target audience can increase engagement rates and ultimately those all-important KPIs.

We can help with that?

At TBT Marketing, we will never sell you just a menu of deliverables. We take the time to fully understand who it is you are trying to communicate with and why, whether it’s a brand-new project or the continuation of an existing one. We probe our clients to think about what makes their audience tick no matter what industry.

We can help you explore your audience and build out audience profiles and personas to ensure we tailor the message and approach to maximise engagements. 

By being smarter with our targeting and through our Future Focused approach to B2B marketing, we will always look to maximise the impact against our clients objectives whilst minimising the footprint left on the environment.