Thinking about your audience is one of the first steps in creating (or updating) a piece of content. Who they are, their preferences, pain points, behaviours, and how they’ll benefit from your services are all essential considerations in ensuring your brand resonates with your target audience.
By developing a comprehensive understanding of your audience, you’ll gain the insight needed to provide a suitable solution to their problem, ultimately ensuring your brand is discovered by the right people.
Today, Hyphen Creatives is taking a look at the importance of getting to know your audience, and how this can even help you improve your lead generation and customer retention.
Why is Knowing Your Audience Important?
By understanding who the people at the core of your target audience are, you’ll be able to tailor content to suit their needs, and ensure what you offer will resolve any challenges they may be experiencing.
If you know your audience, your content will be more likely to resonate with your potential leads and customers. This allows you to foster stronger, long-term relationships with your audience, build brand loyalty, and develop valuable, meaningful connections.
8 Practical Tips to Get to Know Your Audience
Once you understand the importance of knowing your audience, you can take practical steps to deepen your connections with them.
Do Your Research
Doing your research will help you determine your audience’s basics such as age, gender, race, location, employment status, marital status, income, level of education, and more. You should also research any factors that may be relevant to your business and the products or services you provide. Once your audience has expressed an interest in your business, you’ll be able to obtain more comprehensive data through opt-in forms and other personal interactions..
Set Up Buyer Personas
If you don’t already have them, creating buyer personas that represent your ideal customer is a great way to understand the thoughts, needs, and wants of your audience and customers. Buyer personas can include the following information:
- Basic demographics, such as age, gender, etc.
- Where they work.
- Job title.
- Experience level.
- Their goals.
- Fears, challenges, obstacles, etc they may face.
- Interests and hobbies.
- Preferred communication channels.
Armed with the insights from your buyer personas, you’ll be able to group your audience into distinct segments, using these segments to create unique marketing campaigns that precisely target these segments. These campaigns will also be more effective, as you’ll understand the reasons why your audience needs your business.
Buyer personas can also help in other areas of your business, helping you stay focused on your marketing efforts and service development, and improving your ability to reach and connect with the right audience.
Review Your Current Analytics
Reviewing the analytics and data you’ve already collected can also help you get to know your audience on a deeper level. These analytics can help you learn why they engage with your content and what does and doesn’t interest them, which can help you empathise with your audience. The insights from this information can help you identify what your target market wants to gain from your business.
Consider Your Previous Successes
While researching your audience, don’t disregard the products, services, marketing efforts, and customer support that are currently working for them. This tells you why your audience still needs your product, and what they like about interacting with your business. Keeping these factors in mind will help focus your decision-making process when your business evolves to ensure your communication remains beneficial and necessary.
Conduct Surveys
Surveys give you specific answers to questions you have for your audience about your customer service, marketing efforts, products and services, and what they recommend you work on. Your audience can also elect to be anonymous, which can incentivise complete honesty. You can then use this feedback to optimise your content accordingly and to streamline the process of attracting new customers.
Consider Your Competitors
Getting to know your competitors and keeping an eye on them can be incredibly useful. It can help you determine how to effectively reach your audience and see what they are and aren’t responding to. For example, go through their reviews to get to know what people are saying about them. Doing this can also help you identify and address any pain points they may have. Checking their social media will also give you a good look at your shared audience and what type of content they engage with. You can also learn about common interests in your and your competitors’ audiences, and about when they spend their time on the platform.
Monitor Feedback
If you monitor your audience’s feedback over time, either through direct feedback, social media profiles, surveys, or forms, you’ll be able to get a good understanding of the experiences they’re consistently having, both positive and negative. This means you’ll be able to resolve the largest issues and maintain what is working well for your audience, all in real time. It will also learn more about what they like, their habits, and how they seek support.
Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment
Experimenting with new ideas among audience members is a great way to create a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what they want to get out of your content. Consider A/B testing various content types to help you see which gets the most engagement and conversions.
In Conclusion
Getting to know your audience can be a complex process, but it’s necessary in sharing relevant content that resonates, and creating products and services your target customers want to buy. It will also help you build long-term relationships with customers, and turn them into loyal advocates for your brand.
Get in touch with Hyphen Creatives now to find out more about how we can help you leverage your audience to ensure your brand’s success.