Know Your Audience
One of the first topics discussed with every client is, “who is your audience?” Typically, I get the response, “everyone.” This is where many of the challenges begin. What the business owner is hoping for is to cast such a wide net so they don’t miss anyone who may have an interest in their product or service. However, casting such a wide net leaves huge gaps in their marketing so they miss the people who they are really looking to attract.
Before we jump into identifying your audience, we should define what an audience is. An audience is a group of people with specific characteristics. Sounds simple enough, but the real challenge is narrowing your audience scope.
To identify your audience you can either begin wide and work narrow, or work narrow and expand. For instance, a general audience may be “women.” However, for a marketing approach to be effective, the scope needs to be narrowed. Do you cater towards all women or women from a certain social economic level? Is it regionality an issue or are you exclusively only? Are you looking for women that hold a professional career? Retired women? Single women? Married women? The questions could go on forever.
Why is this so important?
The narrower your audience scope, the more effect communication becomes. The reason for this is that you can speak more specifically about struggles and situations that person experiences. It allows you to engage and connect with your potential client specifically.
One of the core purposes in business is to find a need and fill it. For your potential client to feel you empathize with their situation so that you can help them, you must gave a narrow enough scope to engage on more specific terms. This allows you to use words and phrases that have a specific impact on their situation.
Don’t go too far.
One of the dangers of narrowing the scope is taking things a bit too far. For instance, an audience scope of left handed women who like to wear red and has peanut butter for breakfast every morning creates such a small market that it will make your marketing effort difficult. Now, certainly, there are some businesses that have to have such a narrow scope. However, for the most of us, we need to engage a bit larger of an audience.
Can you have more than one audience?
Certainly. Most companies have a primary audience, a secondary audience, as well as a tertiary audience. For instance, a college admission office may have high school seniors as their primary audience. But there is another audience they need to be aware of, the student’s parents. So the parents become the secondary audience. Finally, one of the biggest resources is the alumni. They become the tertiary audience. So when the college communicates, they need to be aware of the impact on each of those audiences.
On top of the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences, you may have a completely separate audience for another aspect of your business. For instance, a company may be broken into categories such as sales and repairs. Each specific category may have specific audiences that engage with that category. Most companies have two or three distinct audiences depending on their make up.
