One of the most important aspects of marketing is reaching your target consumer or your target market. This is because you can develop amazing content and engaging pieces of marketing, but if your target market never hears it, then it is practically useless. Thus, before putting together amazing pieces of marketing or advertising, you must “mind your audience”. Given that your audience is so important, let’s walk through a few essential steps in marketing to your target consumer.
Your audience is ultimately the people who will see your messaging, so the importance of knowing your audience cannot be stressed enough. Here are four steps to help you ensure that you are minding your audience when creating marketing materials!
1. Reflect on your Target Consumer
Have a conversation with your team, your boss, or your employees and ask everyone who your current consumer base is and who their target consumer is. Ask questions such as:
What are their ages?- What is their education?
- What is their role at work or in their family?
- What are they responsible for?
- What are their biggest concerns?
- How do they learn information?
These and other questions can help reveal who exactly your target consumer is, how they think and operate and ultimately how you can reach them with your messaging.
2. Break up your target market into practical segments
Once you’ve had a conversation about who your current customer is, you can break them up into different segments to ensure that you communicate with them more effectively. Keep in mind that the more precise your segmentation is, the more effective your communication will be. At the same time, the more precise your segmentation is, the more costly communicating to each segment will be. For each segment, you may have to create personalized content to ensure you can communicate effectively to that segment, which can be expensive.
Even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing, it is still crucial to create at least three consumer segments. Here are a few ways you can segment:
- By demographics: age, education, household income or others
- By importance/relevance to your business: primary, secondary, tertiary
- By behavior: what source they find you from (social, search, email) or their concerns
3. Understand the segment
Now that you have developed two or three segments, it’s important that you fully understand the segments. Even though you understand your current consumer or your target market because you went through Step 1, it’s important to ask more questions about each segment. Ask questions such as:
- What makes this segment unique?
- How do they search for information?
- What does their typical day look like?
- What knowledge and tools do they use?
- What challenges do they face?
Answering these questions will help you hone in on what makes the segment different from others, and how you should be communicating to each segment differently.
4. Develop content for a specific segment
The purpose of understanding your target market or target consumer is not just for the sake of doing so — it is so that you can deliver more relevant content to them! Now that you understand your target consumer, have developed segments and deeply understand them, you can develop great content to reach those segments in the way they want to be spoken to, with highly relevant information.
For example, if my target consumer is a 25-year-old marketing professional, I’m not going to put an advertisement in the newspaper trying to reach them. I will likely advertise on Facebook about a blog I wrote explaining how millennials can contribute more than ever before in a workforce to the target audience of 21-35 year olds using their phones to view their Facebook News Feed. That’s because I know that my millennial consumer segment uses their phones to view almost all of their social media and I know they are passionate about standing out at work.
Overall, minding your audience is a crucial step in creating great marketing and advertising content. Once you have followed these steps to help you create consumer segments, make sure that you keep them in mind whenever you are looking to create new content. By keeping your consumer segments in mind, you will be able to create more engaging and relevant content at every turn.
Em-Media’s team of experts can help you develop these consumer segments and then can help you reach them with engaging, creative and relevant content! Whether it is through inbound marketing, traditional advertising or any other medium, Em-Media can help you have great marketing and advertising, helping to grow your business.
Knowing your audience is a key step to having a great social media strategy as well. Learn how to attract more customers through Facebook by downloading our Free Facebook eBook!
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