Getting to Know Your Target Audience for Better Results
Who’s your target audience? And how have the tastes and preferences of your target audience changed over the past 5 years? These are important questions to answer as you make advertising plans.
In fact, in post-pandemic America how we think and make decisions has been impacted widely. And for adults under 40, they’ve been heavily impacted by the recession and now the pandemic; a double whammy.
Our Basic Formula for Marketing Success Depends Heavily on Careful Audience Targeting
Some of us struggle to even know whether we’re Gen X, Gen Z, Millenials, or what?! Here’s a quick tool developed by USA Today to help you figure out what generation you’re in, as well as what generation your target audience falls into!
Understanding your target audience in as much detail as possible is one of the key foundations of our basic marketing formula:
TARGETING + MESSAGING + REACH = RESULTS
We often talk about the art and science of modern marketing. The Audience Targeting and Reach components of the formula have become very scientific in recent years. Professional marketers can use digital audience targeting to be extremely precise. And most digital vehicles for audience reach can deliver that target effectively. We consider the messaging component of the formula to still be very much an art, although with AI tools we’re now able to get to results faster by predicting the success or failure of just about any word choice.
Read More: 3 Reasons Advertising Fails & How to Avoid Them
There are Lots of Ways to Determine Your Target Audience
Often even the smallest business has valuable data hiding in various places that can offer a lot of insight into audience targeting:
- Customer Database
- E-Mail List
- Social Media Followers
- Phone System History
- Point of Sale (POS) System
- Delivery Records
- Shipping Records
This list isn’t exhaustive, by any means. And once you find the data there are several methods professional marketers use to help visualize your best customers:
- Digital Mapping
- Psychographic Reports
- Data Enhancement
And once you have a clear view of your existing customers, modern data science is great at developing look-a-like audiences to help you precisely target people who are a lot like your existing customers, who likely have the same need or want.
Need to Talk?
Some of our best new customer relationships start with a free initial marketing consultation, where we bring the relevant experts to answer your questions and solve for the best ways to visualize your existing customers and find more customers like them. It costs you nothing, and it’s a great way for you to explore how professional marketers can grow your business without any risk.
Just schedule time with our team and let us know what questions are on your mind. We’ll make sure we have the right experts on the call so it’s not a waste of your time. It’s one way we invest in you long before you invest in us.
If it’s not time for that step yet, subscribe to our free e-mail newsletter about Local Marketing. That way, you can stay in touch and know when more helpful articles like this are available in our Local Marketing blog.
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