Regardless of your marketing goals, the only way for you to reach them is to get to know your audience. Now, identifying them by their gender, age, education, income and similar characteristics is simplistic and it doesn’t reveal nearly as much as you might hope.
For instance, you can see that your audience is predominantly female and see that Facebook and Pinterest are predominantly female platforms. From here, it’s logical to assume that posting your content on these two platforms will yield the best results, right? Well, both yes and no. You see, marketing is both a delicate science and a subtle art, which is why there are so many different factors to consider. The first step in doing so, nonetheless, lies in getting to know your audience. Here are five ways in which you can do so.
1. Look at your closest competitors
The first thing you can do in order to get to know your audience is to look at the audience of your closest competitors. More likely than not, this is the exact same audience. In some industries, like the smartphone business, people are exclusive to one brand and will either buy Android or iOS devices. In most industries, nonetheless, it’s nothing unusual if the person within the same industry has several suppliers or brands they like. The best example is the fast food industry or the fashion industry (no one sticks to just one brand or eats at a single venue). This is also quite useful if you’re a new business and don’t have a well-developed audience group that you can study.
2. Get to know them personally
The next thing you can do is get to know your audience on a personal level. Needless to say, you can’t get to know all of them, yet, having a candid conversation with a couple of representatives can be quite revealing. In this day and age, it’s quite easy to reach out to a potential client/audience member. Even though not all of them may respond, by customizing/personalizing your outreach and reaching out to enough people, you’ll easily get some prime candidates. From this point on, you get to speak on a personal level (as a part of a P2P marketing effort) in order to see who you’re dealing with.
3. Try social media monitoring
The best thing about social media is the fact that a marketer no longer has to ask for information. Why would they when people are more than willing to offer this information for free, often without being even asked? Imagine launching a product trailer or teaser. How would you measure its effectiveness? Well, the simplest way to do so would be to check the engagement, look at the like/dislike ratio (if we’re talking about YouTube) and look at similar other metrics. It would be even better to find a reliable social media monitoring platform and get an in-depth analysis of your current status in the world of social media.
4. Create a customer persona
Another covert way to do some market research is to make a customer persona and infiltrate all the places that your audience tends to visit on a regular basis. Imagine your average customer and use those crude metrics from the introduction in order to create this persona. How old are you? Are you a male or female? What do you do? Once you have this covered, try to identify which social media groups, forums and subreddits your audience visits the most. Try to adopt their jargon and don’t be afraid to ask a question or even get into an argument. This also gives your brand some insulation from the ramifications of arguing with strangers online, which is a bad practice for brands.
5. Conduct a survey
The last thing you need to do is the old-school marketing technique of conducting a survey. Previously, we’ve talked about some basic traits of your customers and this can be figured out quite easily. On the other hand, if you want to know more about their characteristics or opinions on a certain topic, what you need to do is conduct a survey. This is quite easy to do on your own, yet, if you want to be 100 percent sure that your survey is adequate and efficient, you can find someone to compose it for you.
Conclusion
The very last thing you need to understand is the fact that it’s impossible for you to understand every single one of your audience members. Fortunately, you don’t have to. All that it takes is for you to get a general idea on what your market needs, wants and aspires to. Once you have this information, your business will be virtually unstoppable.
Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is a coauthor on several websites and regular contributor to BizzMark Blog. Currently, he is working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies.