Five Keys to Reaching Your Target Audience

Some of the biggest challenges for marketers are reaching their target audience and getting their attention. So how can you best identify your audience and better connect with them? It’s a long and sometimes tedious process but these Five Key Steps will help to ensure you reach the right people at the right time, so your company and customers can live the Brand to Human® lifestyle.

1. Understand that you do have a target audience.

It’s easy to think that your product or service has universal appeal. While such a positive mindset is a great thing to have, it’s important to recognize that few products are truly universal.

Your primary goal is to reach the right  people, not all the people. Understanding that you do, in fact, have a target audience will help you reach who you need to reach so you can get where you need to go.

2. Get to know your target audience.

Your audience is unique to your brand, so treat them as such. You’ll want to identify who they are and how to reach them in order to create a better connection between their needs and your solutions.

Demographic information is great. By understanding their age, gender and location, for example, you’re better able to communicate your value proposition to your customers based on their lifestyles. But go beyond that. Get to know your ideal customer’s values, opinions, attitudes, intentions, goals, and joys. Get to know them as you would a friend, and you’ll be able to recommend a product or service as a friend.

3. Identify what your customers need from you.

It’s possible that you’re too close to your brand. You know the ins and outs and each and every benefit you can offer. You have to remember that your customer doesn’t know your brand like you do.

This is one of the major benefits of working with an external agency like IDealogic®. By looking at your company through new eyes, you can get a fresh perspective on pain points and take steps to create gain points. You’ll be able to address brand concerns and objections before they happen, so you can spend less time fighting fires and more time communicating with your customer.

4. Know how to communicate with your customers.

What’s the best way to reach your target audience? You can’t just put ads up all over the roadside (or Facebook) and hope for much positive interaction. You need to think about your ideal customers, determine the channels they use the most, and strategically contact them there.

Are they viewing TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, and the web? Are they driving throughout their day? Does their tech-savvy lifestyle enable them to be virtual and digital? If your customers are mostly using social media, they’ll want to be entertained watching videos, or maybe they’d rather be educated and read articles.

Make it as easy as possible for them to talk and engage with you. Open a dialogue with your customer using their preferred channels, and they’ll be much more receptive.

5. Test and measure

So you’ve found your audience and reached out. What were the results? Were you correct in your assessment?

This is where the science and study of it all come into play. Determine if the audience you reached was, in fact, your intended audience. Determine which methods and channels were most and least effective. Test, measure, improve, and repeat.

Don’t assume that your work is finished when your marketing communications launch. In fact, look at the effort as the initial phase, and those findings can then become the secret formula for future marketing initiatives and campaigns.

Just as you would reach out to a new friend, reach out to your customers in a way that will make them feel comfortable—and be sure to do it on their own terms. The Brand to Human® era is all about the person behind the dollar. Treat your customers well, appeal to their lifestyle, understand their sense of value, and become their friend. They’ll become lifelong advocates for your brand.