7 Tools for Better Understanding Your Target Audience

Before you can devise an effective marketing strategy, you need to fully understand your target audience. That means properly identifying who your audience is, understanding how they think, and figuring out how to craft messaging that is relevant to them.

But what are the best tools and strategies for better understanding your target audience?

The Audience Targeting Dynamic

Properly understanding and targeting a specific audience is arguably the most important prerequisite for marketing success. Overly generic, universal messaging may make your products and your brand more visible to a larger number of people, but if your messaging isn't particularly relevant to any one target audience, it's going to be forgettable.

On the other hand, if you understand your target audience well enough that you can properly forecast their needs and understand how they think, you can craft extremely compelling messaging for them. All your marketing and advertising strategies are going to increase in effectiveness, and you'll have a much easier time building brand recognition and brand loyalty.

The trouble is, brands often struggle with audience targeting. Some brands find themselves with multiple competing audiences in no clear direction on which one to choose. Others don't understand their audiences properly. Still others understand their audiences perfectly well, but don't know what types of messaging are going to work best.

With the help of a fractional CMO, you can identify any standing issues with your audience targeting approach and resolve them so your marketing and advertising strategies can be stronger. One of the advantages of hiring a fractional CMO is that they come from outside your organization, so they'll be able to help you identify any potential blind spots currently interfering with your potential.

In the course of your analysis, you'll need to consider things like:

·         Demographics. Think about the age, gender, race, geographic area, religion, career, and values of your target audience.

·         Problems. Do your research to better understand the most pressing problems facing this audience.

·         Values and beliefs. Get to know the values and beliefs of this target audience. How do they make decisions? What things do they find most important?

·         Perspectives. Also pay attention to unique perspectives. How would this audience interpret an ambiguous message? Do they have any strong opinions or beliefs to keep in mind?

Tools for Better Understanding Your Target Audience

So what are the most important tools for better understanding your target audience?

1.      Research organizations. Research organizations like Pew Research Center are a great place to start researching and understanding your target demographics. These sources can tell you about who your audience is, where they live, how much money they make, and in some ways, even how they think. These are primary sources, which are especially valuable, but they aren't going to tell you everything you need to know.

2.      Surveys. If you want to dig deeper and understand more specific things about your target audience, consider conducting surveys. It's not always easy to secure a good response rate to open surveys, but as long as you can get a number of responses, you can forecast broader trends within your demographics. Make sure to ask both quantitative and qualitative questions for best results.

3.      Focus groups. If you're interested in even more details, consider hosting focus groups with people from each of your target audiences. You can ask them about your products and services after live demonstrations or introductions, and you can get to know them on a more personalized level, allowing you to create customer personas.

4.      Interviews. Similarly, you can conduct interviews with individuals who you feel best exemplify your target audience. If you can have a specific, emblematic person in mind, you can craft much more relevant messaging for them.

5.      Social media. Don't be afraid to lean into the data available to you through social media. If your target audience uses social media regularly, pay attention to what they're saying and how they're interacting. What types of things do they find valuable? What types of content are they most likely to engage with?

6.      Website analytics. You can learn more about your specific customers directly by paying close attention to your website analytics. How many people are visiting your website and how are they behaving once they get there? Which pages of your website have the longest dwell time and which ones encourage users to visit other pages?

7.      Experiments. Marketing experiments are perhaps your best tool for audience understanding, as they give you immediate, quantitative, concise results. Test out a variety of different messages, angles, and channels so you can feel more confident about what your target audience will respond to.

If you can clear up the audience targeting equation and create more compelling, specifically targeted messaging for your audience, you'll naturally begin to see better results. Keep in mind that this is an ongoing process, so don't rest on your laurels just because you've made some initial progress.