Blog Post By: Kali Kraft, Baer Performance Marketing Intern
Understanding your target audience is a necessary step in implementing any marketing strategy. If you want your message to resonate with consumers, it needs to be targeted towards their preferences. Knowing your audience helps you to understand what kinds of things they want out of your company. Here a few ways to get to know your audience better.
Do your research
This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s an important one to get done properly. Making sure you know who your target audience is is vital to all future marketing efforts. What kind of demographics would benefit most from your product or service? What does a customer gain by choosing you instead of your competition? Determine who your ideal customer would be, and try to consider how they would interpret and react to everything you do. There are a large variety of helpful social media and social listening tools that can help you to do this, such as Facebook Insights and Hootsuite.
Interact through social media
After understanding who your audience is, that information should be used to tailor your social media content to your audience. However, the essential next step after that is to listen to what they have to say about that content. Read their comments and posts, and connect with your audience by responding to them. Address their concerns, answer their questions, or just thank them for engaging with your company online. Creating a simple poll for customers to participate in can make them feel like you are listening and care about their opinions, and it provides you with information on how to better serve your customers.
Conduct surveys
Surveys are the most straightforward way of getting answers, because they allow you to ask your customers exactly what you want to know about them. They can provide the answers to what your current customers like best about your products and what improvements they would find valuable. Include a survey on your website, send one to email subscribers, and/or post a link on your social media pages. Including an incentive, such as a discount or coupon, can help increase the number of respondents.
All of these strategies will help you better understand your audience, and in turn, help you to better resonate with them. Connect with your audience, and let them know you’re listening!
Sources:
http://www.adweek.com/digital/7-ways-to-learn-more-about-your-community/
https://coschedule.com/blog/how-to-find-your-target-audience/
http://marketingland.com/7-ways-get-know-audience-better-181862
