target audience | Brandignity

You would think staying relevant to your target customer would be easier, but that isn’t always the case. Markets constantly shift, and the people who buy from you today may not do so tomorrow.

This is a big reason many companies struggle to stay relevant to their customers. Because of that, you need to do whatever is possible to find the right people.

If you want to learn how to reach your target audience, look no further. The tips below will help you with audience targeting to make sure you find your ideal customers.

Create an Audience Persona

Before you can start targeting your audience on marketing platforms, it’s vital to understand who they are. You won’t reach the right people with general targeting — you need a customer profile to inform your targeting decisions.

Come up with an audience persona for each type of customer you have. Determine their demographics, interests, problems, and other relevant information. You’ll use this information to write marketing campaigns and set targeting information on marketing platforms.

Find the Right Platforms

You won’t find your target audience on every platform. Yes, some general platforms have a diverse audience, like Facebook. However, you won’t find every customer segment there.

For instance, younger people now spend less time on Facebook. They now hang out on TikTok and other new platforms. Business users are also found more easily on LinkedIn than on other websites.

Determine which platform offers you the best chance to reach people and start marketing campaigns there.

Create the Right Content

The most important part of an online marketing campaign is having the right content. Your goal is to create inbound marketing content that informs potential customers and improves your brand’s value. But that won’t happen if people don’t like what you produce.

Make sure you create content that targets each part of the buying cycle. Informational content is for people looking for solutions to try themselves. Commercial content is for people ready to make a purchase.

Once you have content for each buying cycle phase, you can target people in those phases with your content. Check out this guide to digital marketing to learn more.

Use Your Current Customers

Word of mouth is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers. It’s hard to gain trust on your own — you have to prove that you’re a reputable business, and that can sometimes be hard to do.

But things are different when the recommendation comes from people you trust. A recommendation from a friend means that a company already has trust and is worth buying from.

Ask your current customers to recommend your products to people they know. It’s also possible to create a referral program to encourage this behavior.

How to Reach Your Target Audience: Get Started Today

A great product isn’t worth much if you don’t have an audience. You’ll invest a ton of time and money in product development but not make any of it back because of a lack of sales.

Being able to find your target customers is critical to avoid that problem. Now that you understand how to reach your target audience, start taking action to reach out today and convince them why your business is worth purchasing from.

Do you want to learn more digital marketing tactics that will help every small business grow? Read more marketing articles on the website to learn more.

Driving traffic to your website takes a lot of persistent effort. Once they arrive on your page, you want to capture your target audience and turn them into leads. What is the secret sauce that makes one website work better for an audience segment than another?

One of the best ways to figure out whether or not your site is designed with your target audience in mind is to go through a series of steps to see how well they respond to landing pages. Ideally, your visitor will land on your page, engage in some way, and convert into a lead or customer.

What Is Meant By Design Your Website for the Audience?

Internet Live Stats estimates there are around 200 million active websites in the world. Not every site is your direct competition, but you do have to compete for attention with all the noise and other options for consumers to spend their time on.

What keeps them on your page rather than bouncing to social media or texting a friend, for example? Designing your website for your audience ensures the message is one they want to hear and makes it much more likely they’ll spend more than a few milliseconds on your site. The longer they stay, the more likely they’ll convert.

Here are some things you can do to make sure your website has your target audience in mind:

1. Get to Know Your Customer

You can’t design a site aimed at your target audience until you know who that is. Start by digging into your internal analytics. What do you already know about your average customer? What demographics show up when you use tools such as Google Analytics? Are they coming from a certain site, area or using a particular device to access your pages?

Next, dig through the calls your customer service department receives. What is the number one complaint? Have you solved the issue already or do you need to do some more work? Have customers said why they chose to buy from you or why they continue to?

Finally, send out surveys with key questions to help you better understand your audience’s needs. You might wonder what their most pressing pain point is. Ask! You won’t know unless you gather information. You can then design a site that meets their needs.

Source: https://www.melissaanddoug.com

Melissa & Doug knows from looking at internal shopping information that their site visitors are going to either look for a particular category of toy or shop by age. They offer these navigational tools to help people go directly to the section they most need.

2. Add Useful Tools

Spend time thinking about what tools would be most helpful to your target audience. What pain point drives them to seek a site like yours in the first place? If you figure out their problem, then you can decide what ways you might be able to most easily solve it for them. Offer a tool, calculator, video, or other freebies to draw them in and give them a taste of how you can make their lives better.

Did you know something as simple as adding a chatbot to your site can improve customer engagement as much as 90% via response rates? You could also offer a calculator, a free downloadable guide, or how-to videos.

Source: https://homewellfranchising.com

HomeWell is an in-home care service franchise. They have locations across most of the United States. If you want to know more about opening your own franchise, you can click on their call to action (CTA) button to explore available territories and locations or see the approximate cost of opening your own business with the HomeWell name.

3. Tell a Story

People love a good brand story. However, will yours resonate with your target audience or not? If most of your customers are younger, they may want to know what causes you stand behind or what current adventures you’re on. Other generations might prefer to hear about the lengthy history of a brand or the story behind its founding. Still, others may want to know what hardships you’ve overcome.

Find your story and tweak it so it resonates with your customers. You can always ask them which elements spoke most strongly to them.

Source: https://www.ruthstoffee.com

Ruth’s Toffee shares the story behind the company founder and an image of her making the excellent toffee the company is famous for. The treats are still handmade. You can see from the pride beaming behind her smile that she puts love and care into her concoctions.

4. Showcase Your Talents

Figure out how you can show what you offer either via videos, testimonials, or a photo gallery. If you have a lot of before and after pictures, such a task will be fairly easy. However, you still have to decide which shots your audience cares about.

You might be proudest of a commercial building you rehabbed. However, if most of your customers are residential, they won’t care much about the same image. They’ll be interested in projects similar to theirs. Think about who your typical customer is and choose the images and videos you share based on what they would like to see.

Source: http://stonevalleyproductions.com

Stone Valley Productions uses video footage to show some of the talents they bring to business videos. You see all types of shots, from aerial to live action. By showcasing their abilities in their own video, they tap into the exact audience who’s looking for what they offer.

Testing Your Website

Once you’ve incorporated the things that make a site attractive to your target audience, it’s time to test it and see what can be perfected. Use split testing and try different CTA buttons. Poll your customers and ask them if they prefer one particular landing page over another. Put yourself in your user’s shoes and keep tweaking until you hit the conversion rate you desire.

Author

Eleanor Hecks is the editor of Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

Your website is your brand’s digital face. You want to ensure your personality as a company shows and the site is functional. However, does the site truly focus on your target audience? What elements speak to the buyer personas you serve?

According to the United States Small Business Administration, there are approximately 32.5 million small businesses, making up 99.9% of all companies in the country. Every element of your online presence must be on-point if you wish to compete with the many other firms out there.

What should your site include if you want to reach your target audience? Not everything is equal when it comes to creating a business site. Here are the top elements you should focus on to ensure your website pulls users in and keeps them engaged.

1. Know Your Own Identity

You can dig into the data and figure out who your target audience is, but you must also brand your business throughout your website. Your goals should align with highly qualified leads. Include information users most want to know about your brand, such as your experience and guarantees.

The best business sites keep their brand personality while also speaking directly to their target audience. You must balance who you are as a brand and who your customers want you to be for true long-term success.

Meadlight offers a fermented honey drink. The brand has neutral colors with a pop of honey yellow. Note how they put the product in a location that makes it stand out for the audience. They also engage the user by having a dot of yellow move across the screen as the person moves their cursor.

2. Integrate Marketing

Bring all departments together when designing your site, so users get a consistent experience. Make sure marketing keeps design informed and vice versa. If your promotional team lists a special, it should appear the minute the user clicks on a link and traverses to your website.

The look, language and offers should all align for a cohesive experience. Your target audience shouldn’t have to hunt for the deal initially driving them to your site.

3. List Industries Served

Want to cut to the chase and let users know if you can help them and meet their needs? Identify the industries you serve and list them on your home page. People can easily see what your speciality is and if you’re a good match.

Illuminated Integration shows the most common types of businesses they serve. They use an icon for the industry and then use a subtitle under to indicate the places they’ve worked for, such as schools, museums, churches and theaters.

The list isn’t meant to limit them, as they are capable of working in other areas, but it shows their expertise to someone on the fence about hiring their services.

4. Audit Your Content

Does your content meet the needs of your audience? When people land on your page, is there enough to inform and engage them? Spend time going through old blog posts. Get rid of anything not applicable to your users.

Know your customer pain points. Does your content answer those problems and provide possible solutions? The more detailed your advice, the more your clients feel understood and engaged.

5. Show the Benefits

List advantages from the viewpoint of the customer. Your target audience wants to know what your product or service does for them. You can likely list the pros of your company and maybe even your unique value proposition.

You must go a step further and explain the benefits as they apply to your user. Some of the features may coincide with your competitors. Dig into the elements that make your brand unique. Why are you the absolute best option for your audience?

Bonafina provides large-scale printing equipment to other businesses. Note how they showcase the benefit to their audience—gaining support and help to choose the right items. People spend a lot on the machines, so they want assurance they’ll have some guidance in choosing correctly.

6. Overcome Objections

Social media is the dream of marketing professionals. You can use it to gain insight from a target’s posts. They might list some of their objections to other brands on their site, give you an inside tip on a personal preference or just list age and gender.

You can use all the information gathered from a few prospects to create a buyer persona. Once you have a general idea of preferences and behaviors, you can tweak your landing pages to better meet the needs of your users and overcome any objections they might have.

7. Learn Their Language

When it comes to connecting with your target audience, it isn’t only what you say but the way you say it. For example, you can tap into the lingo for the type of customer you wish to reach. If you want to sell lessons to twenty-something golf enthusiasts, what are some of the phrases they use?

Try different combinations of words for your headings and your calls to action (CTAs). With a little practice, you’ll write high-converting CTAs. Implement new phrasing and run a split test to see how users respond.

Tweak Your Site Often

Try different tactics and compare them to the old version. A/B tests show how well users respond to different colors, positions and language for your page’s elements. Take the time to run split testing, study the results and tweak your site until you reach the conversion rate you want.