Who Is Your Brand Reaching? Learn How To Get To Know Your Audience Better
Would you wear cut-off shorts to the office? Or show up in a cocktail dress to a movie night with friends? Definitely not. Just like you style a unique outfit for each event you attend, you must utilize specific communication styles depending on the audience that you’re trying to reach with your brand!
In this post, we’ll give you our top tips for getting to know your brand’s audience and share our insights on how you can best connect with them. Are you ready?
The Importance of Defining Your Audience
To have a successful business, it’s likely that you want your customer or client base to receive your message and receive it well. To do this, you’ll want to do the following:
- Determine who you are talking to — this is defining your audience
- Speak their language! Craft your message to reach the target audience
This process is crucial in connecting with your crowd. By carefully considering an audience, brands are more likely to get positive responses — and depending on the brand that could mean a higher return on investment, more social media engagement, or increased sales.
Plus, you’ll save time researching who is interested in your brand and how to reach them now, which will give you more time to focus on building your brand down the road.
Understand Your Audience In 5 Simple Steps
Here at Bloguettes, we understand the importance of determining and reaching a target audience. We’ve crafted 5 actionable ways for you to define your audience effectively.
1) Do your homework on your audience.
By preparing in advance, you’ll be better able to identify and understand your viewers. First, start with the basics. Some key demographic factors to consider are:
- Age
- Gender
- Education and income levels
- Cultural and family backgrounds
- Geographic location
Next, dive into more personal aspects of your audience. Remember, your audience represents more than a number of age or income, and because of this, you’ll want to include their:
- Values and opinions
- Niches
- Personality traits
- Problems and goals
2) Learn from others.
These days, companies dedicate time to perfecting their ability to connect with their audiences because this ultimately leads to happier customers and more successful brands. Discovering your unique audience is a process that will take time. So why not save yourself the headache of potential mistakes by learning from others?
It’s likely that your brand’s competitors, role models, and industry leaders have created strategies and techniques to connect with their supporters. See what works (or doesn’t work) for them. This can serve as a guide when defining your target audience.
3) Listen to your audience.
By understanding what your audience is already telling you, you’ll be able to develop your target audience profile in no time. Here are some questions to ask when hearing out your audience:
- How do they engage in ways that are different from others?
- What are social and Google Analytics telling your brand?
- What are they saying? Practice social listening!
To get the nitty-gritty details on your audience, you might even send out a survey or interview a group of your brand’s customers, clients, and followers. Then, use this information — along with everything else you’ve gathered — to develop personas.
4) Create audience personas.
Once you’ve gathered your audience’s demographic details, examined the strategies of other companies, and listened to your client base directly, it’s time for you to make personas.
A persona, or character profile, is a simple way to represent all the details about your audience in one location. The persona serves as a generalized idea of your audience. Here are examples of personas to get you started!
By having personas for your audience members, you’ll be able to quickly share information about your target audience with other team members. Now they can conceptualize the ideal customer of your brand, and aim to better communicate with them.
5) Work backward.
Sometimes it just makes sense to start at the end and work your way to the beginning. If you’d like to try this approach to define your target audience, here’s what you’ll want to do:
- Define your product or service
- Determine who would benefit from what your brand offers
- Consider how they’d get connected with your business (possibly social media)
- Outline their specific characteristics or demographics
By working backward, you can define your ideal customer and therefore your target audience!
This Is How You Can Connect With Your Audience
Now that you know who your audience is, you may be wondering how you can reach them? For your message to be received, you’ll need to meet your audience where they’re at! Think about:
- Where does your audience get their information?
- What sources do your customers trust?
Answer these questions by seeing how your followers comment on social media. Look at where they engage, how often they participate, and what they say.
From there, you can choose a channel to communicate on. Keep in mind, the type of audience and engagement on Facebook is different from that on Instagram, email newsletters, or Youtube.
But, wait! What you communicate is just as important as where you deliver your brand’s information. The tone and voice of your brand are incredibly important to how your audience will interpret your message. Does your crowd respond to concise and factual information, trendy and sassy posts, or classic and conversational language?
We’ve pulled together a couple of brands that have mastered their voices. Because of this, they’ve been able to connect with their audiences and find success through branding.
1) Warby Parker.
This prescription eyeglass and sunglass retailer has created successful marketing campaigns through creativity and understanding their audience. Even more interesting is that Warby Parker is a digitally native brand, which has encouraged them to make the most of branding and creating a community through online platforms. Here’s a look into how Warby Parker understands their audience, and delivers!
Commitment to core values. Warby Parker donates a pair of glasses for every pair sold. Because their target audience is comprised of millennials and they’re also looking to purchase from socially-conscious labels, Warby Parker is able to deliver on sales and reflect their audience’s beliefs.
Connecting with the modern consumer. It’s no surprise that Millennials enjoy nice things, but typically they’re not looking for luxury in a price tag, but rather in a priceless experience. Warby Parker allows for home try-on of glasses purchased online and now a personal sales experience like no other — with one-on-one salesperson-to-buyer interactions — in their brick and mortar retail locations. Not to mention, their shops are trendy, minimalistic, and Instagrammable (something that is becoming more and more important with the modern consumer).
Showcase user-generated content. What better way is there to market to your core audience than by using posts created by that audience? By featuring user-generated content, Warby Parker is living the best of both worlds — they are positive that they are reaching their intended audience and they are saving time and investments as content and interest are coming to them organically. Here are some examples of how Warby Parker features content from real people to reach their true audience.
2) Shut The Kale Up.
This platform was developed by Jeanette Ogden, an Instagrammer that delivers content related to real food, fitness, health, and mom life via her social platform. Jeanette believes that her success as an influencer is credited to her filterless ways. She has won over the interest of 286k followers by understanding her audience and creating content that is both relatable and desirable.
A natural and comfortable approach. Jeanette preaches her values of eating “real food” and showing her “real life,” and this is all demonstrated on IG through her “real talk.” On her platform, she tells her day-to-day story of balance, motherhood, and life in general. What sets Jeanette apart from other Instagram bloggers, is that she portrays herself in a completely authentic way. This allows her audience to feel like they are really getting to know her. This tactic naturally attracts her audience to her feed — and keeps them there.
Creating a supportive and supported community. Jeanette makes engaging with her followers a priority, and it’s paid off! By investing time and being involved with her posts, she is able to reach specific members of her audience, which lets them know that they are valued and heard. Here, Jeanette is truly building a community. Plus, by reading and responding to her audience she is able to create an emotional connection with her followers, allowing her to develop content that is really directed to target her audience’s values and hearts.
Time To Get Started!
Now, you’re ready to identify the audience of your brand and develop a strategy of how to best connect with them. By doing this, you can tailor your branding efforts to be relevant to each group in your target audience. Focusing your message to your main target audience will make your brand stand out, and ultimately bring profitable and reachable success!
Just remember, the process of determining your audience takes time. It’s okay to review and refine your message and strategies as you go — brands evolve and change with time, and audiences will too.
Wanting to learn more about developing your brand’s identity? Or are you interested in perfecting your social media strategy? Reach out at hireus@bloguettes.com where we’ll work with you to deliver a creative plan for your brand’s needs!
