Define Your Audience: The first step to being more effective in your marketing
To refine your messaging and how you communicate with your audience, it is essential that you know your ideal customer inside and out. When you hone in on this detail you can market to them more effectively.
Defining your audience does not need to take long and is a critical step for any business when looking to target them both online through social media, your website, or direct mail, and offline through brochures and face-to-face interactions. Understanding the emotions, goals and frustrations of your audience will help you raise engagement and ultimately conversions.
How The Heck Do I Do This? Easy! And It Only Takes 15 Minutes!
I have included two downloadable documents below – one for defining your demographics, the second an outline for your persona.
Be as specific as you can be – you know the saying:
“If you try to market to everyone, you are marketing to no-one.”
To make it easy, start with one demographic and persona, refine it, and then move onto your second and third.
Start with your Demographics
It is important to consider each response in terms of your website, your social media and any other direct marketing you do.
Download Our Demographic Definition
Once demographics are defined, it’s time to get creative!
Your persona should embody someone likely to visit your website and make a decision to contact you. To create a fully fleshed out persona, your persona should have the following characteristics:
- A picture to help you and your team visualise who you are targeting
- Personal details – a family – create a believable family that makes your user ‘real’, a job / role – what do they do each day that may require your services, and more
- Online behaviour – what do they do online? Are they naive, intermediate or advanced users? What devices do they use, and in what context? What social media channels do they frequent?
- A scenario – why they would be visiting your website?
You are looking to write a paragraph on each item, and ensure others in your team have input. To get the most out of your personas, all people in your organisation should get to know them inside and out, so make your persona believable.
Once done, stick them on the wall!
Great businesses will pin up their personas around their workplace as a constant reminder to who they are targeting. Use them to guide your team on marketing decisions, website changes and other collateral in your organisation including but not limited to:
- Branding, colours
- Messaging, language and copywriting
- Website design, imagery and call to actions, user journeys
- Marketing strategy and content
- Social media strategy and campaigns
