Audience Targeting
The key to a creating a successful campaign for a target audience starts with these questions:
- Who is your target audience, and is there more than one?
- Where is your target audience?
- What type of content is your target audience looking for, and how do you go about creating it?
Who is your target audience?
The Buyer Persona. According to Hubspot, a buyer persona is a concept or representation of your ideal customer(s) based on research and data. Creating buyer personas will help your team identify your target audience.
Keep in mind, most products or services appeal to more than one buyer persona. If you’re serious about audience targeting, your team should create several personas, and create content for each one as a separate target.
For example, let’s say that you are a graphic design & web development agency. How would you go about audience targeting? Several steps:
Look at your top clients. Who are they? Write down their job title, their demographic data (gender, location, education, income level). Create a separate list for each client.
*Keep reading for a link to Hubspot’s free template.
Give a copywriter access to a buyer persona, and watch the catchy headlines grab the target audience
Click to tweet
Where is your target audience?
Where does this client “hang out” in the digital space?
What do they read, and how do they get there?
For example, if you are a graphic design and web development firm, and your top clients have titles like “Director” or “CEO” in their title, chances are, they are not going to fall into the Millennial category (sorry Millennials; blame the data). If they fall into the Gen X or Baby Boomer demographic, where are they gathering information, and what attracts them to those resources?
Lists. Lists are your friend when answering this question.
What type of content is your target audience looking for, and how do you go about creating it?
- What type of asset: Words? Videos? Photos?
- How many times do they visit before they contact? (Remarketing content, anyone?)
- Does your target audience convert better from informational content, or content that is sassy with a side of creative?
Yes, this is the part where you should bust out the white board and gather your team around. The water might get a little muddier on the way to clarity, hang on!
Need a roadmap for this process? Check out these helpful resources and tools:
- Hubspot’s Buyer Persona Free Template
- Michael King’s epic post on using data to drive persona creation
- Kaiser The Sage: Helpful info on Hummingbird and the target audience
- Social Fresh post on Millennials vs. Baby Boomers
- Looking for a shortcut? There isn’t one, but this post by Jason DeMers can help if you’ve got a case of analysis paralysis. Like that one? He has a follow up post on Forbes.