How well do you really know your audience? This is a question that very few marketers and business owners can answer thoroughly. In fact, the reality is that some 40% don’t actually have any real clue who their audience is besides the obvious: age, sex, and location.
This is one of the main reasons why some businesses struggle to create content that truly resonates with their audience. Fortunately, in this article, we’re going to share 5 proven tips for truly understanding who your target audience is and thus connect with them in a deep and meaningful way.
Ready?
Table of Contents
How to truly understand your audience
So, how can you get to know your audience, truly?
1.) Begin with what you already know
To say that you know nothing about your audience would be presumptuous. After all, you’ve gone into business so you must have a basic understanding of the type of person who would fit into your broader audience.
So, start there; take the information that you already have on your audience and use it as a foundation upon which to grow.
Now it’s time to find some juicier details…
2.) Start piece together buyer personas
You can create positive and negative buyer personas in order to determine who your ideal audience really is.
A buyer persona is basically a fictional composite character of what you believe your ideal customer (or not so ideal customer) would look like.
You can base these on the data you’ve collected thus far and start refining your search from there. In any case, it’s a bit of fun and you should have a visual idea of what your prospective customers will look like.
3.) Use survey data to your benefit
You can yield a lot of juicy data from surveys and the best part? You don’t need to rely exclusively on internal surveys of your own creation to get the information you need.
There are many websites out there where you can research various studies from differing industries to see what kind of information you can find.
4.) Look to your competitors
It always feels a bit cheeky looking at your competitors, especially when it comes to their marketing efforts and content creation. However, this is a necessary part of being in business: “Know thine enemy.”
Look for things like brand voice; how do they communicate with their audience through their content creation? What is their interaction like with customers on social media?
The more data you can gather, the clearer an idea of your ideal buyer persona you will be able to paint.
Be a fly on the wall and study your competitors and the way they interact with their audience and take notes!
5.) Track and analyse all of your customer engagement
Audiences are significantly engaged with brands on social media, there’s no doubt about it! So, use this to your advantage and utilise the various tracking and analytics tools that can help you compile and collate all of your online interactions with your customers.
How does your audience respond to certain post types? Do they appear to be more responsive to long-form blog posts? Do they prefer video? Were they more engaged when you used humour in your posts?
Collect data like it is going out of fashion and use every single interaction (both online and off) to continue painting this grand customer portrait of yours!
How to resonate with your audience?
If you go into immense depth with your audience research and manage to resurface for air with a wealth of actionable insights at your disposal, resonating with your audience will be easy!
The main reason why businesses do not resonate well with their audience is because they have no idea who they are posting for.
So, figure that out – and then you can put together a content creation strategy. What kind of content makes them tick? How can you trigger their emotions and get them invested in your content creation?
- Make sure that each post you create is simple and direct. You can lose a lot of people if you make things more complicated than they need to be.
- Share useful, game-changing content. If you want to truly resonate with your audience, understand their needs and then provide them with solutions!
- Take risks and don’t be afraid to make waves in your industry. The best content is informational, entertaining, and in some-cases, controversial!
Conclusion: Do your research
One thing you’ll notice in digital marketing, whether it is local SEO in Dubai, a PPC campaign on Google, or social media marketing on Facebook; it all boils down to the amount of time and effort you are willing to put into the research.
The brands who go above and beyond to take control of their online presence will always know their audience better; and the brands who know their audience better are always better-positioned to create awesome, engaging, and ‘share-worthy’ content.
Put the effort in and the rest will follow.
