Three Ways to Get to Know Your Audience
Here’s How You Find Your Audience
Summer is over, and the holidays are (somehow) just around the corner, which means the busiest marketing period. Chances are you are ramping up for holiday sales, specials, offers, and services and shifting the focus from summer splurges to holiday gifting. As such, it is time to take a new, fresh look at your audience. Are you tapping everyone you possibly can? What if there is an entire demographic that you didn’t even know existed? Knowing your audience is the core of every single marketing strategy, and it doesn’t hurt to take a new look at it every once in a while. Keep reading to learn the three ways to get to know your audience, find your audience, and why it is so important.
Why Does Finding My Audience Matter?
Ever heard the saying, “if you’re talking to everybody, you’re talking to nobody”? Drilling down and finding your target audience is essential, or else you are going to be speaking too broadly. Generic messaging often goes way overlooked and, contrary to what you may want to believe, not everybody in the world is going to be the right fit to buy from you.
Consider dentists: Everyone has teeth, right? So, why shouldn’t everybody be targeted to come to their clinic? Well, there are a few things to consider here:
- Where is the clinic located? Dentists should be considered local businesses and, as such, have local and hyper-targeted marketing to their area. Marketing to too broad of an area can be a detriment and will waste a lot of ad budget money. For example, if the dentistry is located in Woodland Hills, then Woodland Hills and immediate areas should be targeted only. How far would people drive to go see a dentist? Los Angeles as a whole should not be targeted, because—let’s face it—nobody is going to drive from Downtown LA to Woodland Hills just for a dentist appointment!
- Who lives in the area? It is important to consider who lives in the area, the socioeconomic landscape, median incomes, and popular hobbies. Knowing how to talk to different types of people is essential when it comes to successful marketing. You wouldn’t have the same messaging for an entry-level figure that you would for a doctorate-level figure, which makes it important to know who is the majority that lives in your area. Are there a lot of working-class folk? Don’t use the same marketing that you would use for a CEO!
- What type of dentistry is offered? A pediatric dentist in middle America should have much different marketing to a luxury cosmetic dentist in Beverly Hills. Bright and fun colors along with a smiling face should be portrayed for the pediatric dentist, while sleek and sexy should be the focus for the luxury cosmetic dentist. This can be determined by understanding more about who lives in your area. Are you in a family-centric suburb? Make sure your marketing caters to parents who want to make their children feel comfortable and safe while at the dentist.
- Are there specialties? Does the dental office offer specialized dentistry such as sleep apnea or TMJ treatment? Does the doctor have extra training in a certain type of dental disease? Do you offer sleep dentistry or special surgeries not available from other dentists in the area? If so, this should be a huge focus for the clinic. As a dentist, everyone would assume that you offer the typical stuff, but they would not inherently know you offer all the extras—so make sure they know!
Audience Targeting
One of the main ways you can find your audience is through audience targeting. A fancy explanation from Adobe is: Audience targeting is the ability to take your full audience of prospective customers and segment it into groups based on different criteria, including online behavioral characteristics, demographics, interests, and intent. Audience targeting helps you more effectively deliver personalized and optimized experiences based on customer needs and interests.
All of this is achieved through collecting data. As creative and innovative as marketers love to be, we also thrive on data, and it truly drives what we do. We achieve this by, for example, running an ad. By running an ad, we are able to collect data on who sees it, who interacts with it, who ignores it, who follows through with it, and much more. We are able to take all of that information to A/B test another ad to see if it does better with new copywriting and graphics. This process goes on and on until we are able to see the perfect cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition number!
Drawbacks: Targeting Limitations on Facebook Ads
Here are some of the targeting limitations on Facebook Ads, as explained by Facebook:
Starting April 11th, 2022, we will begin rolling out changes to consolidate the Ad Topics and Interest Categories controls into a single Ad Topics control, which will cover a more extensive set of ad topics. People will be able to access it on both Facebook and Instagram. This will simplify and expand the controls people have by allowing them to use a single control to set preferences across ad topics that reflect the interest targeting categories advertisers may use to reach them and the content they might see in an ad.
Starting January 19, 2022 we will remove Detailed Targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation. Examples include:
– Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)
– Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)
– Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)
– Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures
So, what is Facebook doing to help small businesses thrive? Here’s their explanation:
- An advocacy group looking to drive donations or a small business trying to connect with its customers can use Engagement Custom Audiences to reach people who have liked their Page or people who have watched their videos that may have appeared in News Feed (Video View Engagement Custom Audiences). These people have already shown direct interest in and engaged with the advertiser’s cause or brand and may be interested in supporting when an advertiser reaches back out.
- Businesses and groups can also use these Engagement Custom Audiences as a seed audience to build Lookalike Audiences to help them further widen the people they can reach
- Website Custom Audiences and lookalikes based on these audiences can help reach people who have already engaged with a business or group’s website or products.
- Location Targeting can be used to reach people in the vicinity of a business’s brick and mortar store or within the radius of their shipping capabilities if they are online based.
- Additionally, businesses and groups who have permission from their customers are able to use their customer data for targeting via customer lists from a custom audience.
Creating Personas
Another one of the ways to get to know your audience includes creating personas. A target audience persona outlines a typical member of your target audience. It’s a really fun exercise in which we develop fictional representations of your audience rooted in demographic and behavioral data that we gleaned from the Audience Insights report. At Navazon, we usually create three audience personas to represent three different audience segments. We give them names, faces, and a clear background.
We learn a lot about your audience or your potential audience from the Audience Insights report. However, there are still a lot of unknowns. If we are to relate to them at a deeper level, we need to understand:
Their feelings
Pain points
Aspirations as related to your products or services
We use a creative process called Empathy Mapping to dig deep into your ideal customer’s psyche. With empathy mapping, we learn how your audience perceives their world as related to your products or services. From there, we are able to construct a marketing plan that connects with your audience at a deeper level. Some of the things that may be included in that marketing plan include:
- Design products
- Brand messaging
- Advertisements
Sentiment Analysis
The third way to get to know your audience is through sentiment analysis. How do people feel about you on the internet? Do you know what people are saying, sharing, commenting, or liking when it comes to you? This is extremely important to keep on the forefront because if your audience doesn’t like something, it’s time to ditch it ASAP.
A Sentiment Analysis Report by Navazon reveals what people think, want, and feel about a topic or brand based on their conversations on social media. The report shows a graphic representation of sentiments and feelings for a given keyword.
It also shows related keywords and other popular topics related to your target topic or brand. The report helps brands develop products that meet market demand. The report also helps marketers adjust market strategy and talk about products and services in a way that resonates with customers.
Sentiment analysis can pick up negative discussions and give you real-time alerts so that you can respond quickly and avoid extensive reputation damage. Or, you can use your competitor’s negative sentiments to your advantage to create an effective marketing campaign and grab market share!
Speaking of Your Competitors
As part of the sentiment analysis report, you’ll see what people think of your competitors. This is so valuable because you can piggyback on what they are doing right, or avoid what they are doing wrong. Did they recently run an offer that totally bombed? Use that to your advantage. Find what people didn’t like about it, tweak it, and make it your own. The same goes for successful campaigns that they run. What were the graphics like? How was the wording? What stood out the most? Competitor analysis is a great way to A/B test things—without having to go through the headache and money of running the A test first!
Find Your Audience with Navazon Digital
Ready to find your audience? We are experts in that. Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency. This is accomplished through targeted graphics, videos, and websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics. It is an approach that’s proven effective for companies of all sizes, from start-ups and medium-sized businesses to large firms with an international presence.
We are content creators who listen to our clients so that we can formulate ideas and strategies based on your unique goals and philosophies. Thinking through those goals with our analytics-based approach, we study not only your tendencies but those of your competition and the market as a whole.
Equipped with this knowledge, we develop a powerful plan, test it and then roll it out on a modest scale. Once we arrive at the winning formula, we can scale up rapidly to meet even the most optimistic growth projections.
At Navazon, we do not believe in “one size fits all.” Every part of the marketing plan is customized to address your unique niche and positioning strategy. It’s how we excel. It’s why we succeed.
Schedule a free consultation with us now! Visit us at navazondigital.com for more information.
