The art of knowing your audience

From social media campaigns, to pay-per-click advertisements, and even the most basic of SEO strategies, one of the core principles of each is that of the target demographic(s).

The target demographic is the bread and butter of everything that your business will do. It will form your core audience, your most loyal customers, and will produce the bulk of the referrals and word-of-mouth of which allows a business to thrive.

Knowing and understanding your key demographic, however, is far harder. It requires a complex approach of research and critical analysis. It would be nice to dominate the countrywide market right from the get-go, but before that, you have to know who your biggest fans are, and where they are.

In this article, we’re going to be talking about the research and ongoing analysis side of building audience demographics. Running through some neat tips on how to conduct the research initially – as well as expanding the reach of your demographics into sub-demographic categories – we hope that by the end of the read, you will be able to have a very good idea on who you need to market to.

The who, what, where, and when’s

These are the five most important questions you should ask yourself about anyone that would be interested in purchasing your services or products:

• Who would use my company?
• What would they be using it for?
• Where would they reside or be most likely to use my products or services?
• When are they most active during their daily routines?

Let’s use an IT company like ours as an example, the answers to these questions would be, in order:

• Businesses looking to either enhance their online presence, or fine tune their working routine through dedicated software.
• For the gain of their own marketing purposes, or to improve their working efficiency.
• Online, or within their own physical business throughout the greater Melbourne region.
• During regular trading hours.

From answering these questions, we understand right away where, when, and to whom we should be marketing to, whilst also answering what the message should be. Yes, they are very simple. However, at this stage of the process in determining your key demographic, the sample size will likewise be simple, too. This is owing largely to the nature of the theory behind business and consumer networks – where one opens up connection to another.

Development of a targeted campaign

With different audiences comes different requirements and tastes. Those interested in investing into an IT service would want to hear about the numbers behind their investment, and may not be particularly keen on a loud gimmick marketing campaign, for example.

Depending on your particular goods or services, come up with ways to reach the audience that you have identified. Start thinking about both how you wish to express your business to them, and what this audience would most likely want to her, and how they want to hear it. It may also be worth to see what either your direct competitors or similar businesses targeting the same people have done in regards to the message they’re sending to this audience.

Analysing its effects – the most important aspect

Whether it be for Facebook, organic SEO, pay-per-click, or general research into your key audience, being able to analyse how any particular campaign is reaching them is vital. Your audience will change over time, purely because expectations will rise as your sector evolves and changes naturally. Being agile enough to adapt to these changing expectations is the mark of a business that truly understands their customer base.

Looking at how your audience reacts on your social media pages, and even your competitors’ to a certain degree, is a great way to understand these changes in thought. Even the way that people that visit your website; what pages they specifically visit, and which one’s they do not, will also be an indicator of what your key audience is expecting from you. You should always be analysing the effects of any campaign that you conduct.

If successful, what do I expect to get out of this?

Understanding and reaching out to your key audience can do much more than just provide a greater connection to your customers. Any strong online marketing campaign will have this connection as a core tenant of its success, with the flow-on effects from this building up a loyalty which will see them returning to your website and/or social media pages constantly. This recurring loyalty creates word of mouth, swelling your audience immensely.

At ITCC, every aspect of our digital marketing campaigns revolves around being able to understand your core audience. We seek to connect to them through an understanding of what they want, whilst highlighting the benefits that will make your particular business attractive.