If you’ve ever asked your team “Who is our audience?” and someone exclaimed “everyone”, we feel your pain. As much as you want to respond with “No, nope, uh-uh, hard pass, negative, yeah nah, not on your life”, it doesn’t stop people from believing that your marketing budget should stretch to engage every person on the planet.
Sometimes it can be difficult to shift away from the “everyone” answer and develop a targeted audience strategy. The trick in those conversations is to understand how your team defines the word everyone.
To help guide the conversation, we’re sharing our four-step approach to defining your audience. We find this approach helps to narrow the focus and understand who everyone actually is, in a way that brings your team on the journey.
Address the elephant in the room immediately by defining who your target audience actually is. Very rarely does anyone truly mean everyone in the literal sense of the word. Using broad demographics such as location, age, gender, occupation, and income helps ring fence a simple definition. At this point, it can be helpful to share an extreme example of someone who would most definitely not use your product or service to showcase why “everyone” is not the answer you’re looking for.
For example, an ecommerce clothing retailer might define their target audience simply as anyone in the world with access to the internet looking for new clothes.
Once you have a broad definition of your target audience, you can guide the conversation to further define what it means specifically for your organisation. Refining the demographics and bringing in psychographics to build a picture of your ideal customer/user is a great place to start. This gives you typical identifiers while also providing further insight into their lives and what might motivate them to engage with your brand.
Using our ecommerce clothing retailer as an example, when we refine our version of everyone we might see a more detailed profile such as women between 35 and 60 years, primarily based in New Zealand and Australia, regular internet shoppers, high disposable income, not looking for high-end but wants quality garments.
After narrowing down the audience scope in steps one and two, it’s easier to segment your ideal audience and define who you’re talking to. Segmenting your audience is the process of identifying subgroups and commonalities within your ideal audience, helping you develop a targeted marketing strategy.
While there are several ways to do this, we like to use audience motivators, product understanding, lifestyle or product/service/channel use cases. Basically anything that puts you in the audience’s shoes and helps you develop some assumptions about how to best engage with them.
Going back to our ecommerce retailer example, we might segment by what motivates our audience to develop the following profile:
Which can then be segmented into shopping motivators:
Now that you have a narrowed scope of everyone to help you decide how to engage, take it one step further and develop personas. This is the process of creating a fictional picture of an individual audience member to represent each of your segments.
Personas are built from customer data and assumptions, and can be helpful when developing your marketing or comms strategies. They also work as a hypothesis to help you test your marketing and comms activity against.
You can build these audience pictures in a number of ways. We like to focus on the different levels of need alongside demographics and associated lifestyle patterns. However you build them, just make
For our ecommerce retailer example, the start of a persona might look like:
From here, you can begin to develop your overarching strategy, marketing plan and individual channel tactics with a collective understanding of who everyone actually is to your business.
