How working with one of the top marketing firms in Seattle can help you learn more about your audience

As a business, you need to know who you are selling your products to, otherwise, your advertising efforts may not be making it to the people who are interested in your products. Sometimes though, it can be difficult to identify exactly who your target audience is, and sometimes it is not who you originally thought it would be when you planned your business. Working with one of the top marketing firms in Seattle can help you identify your audience and develop a strategy to reach them. In the meantime, here are a few tips to help you identify your target audience so you can focus your advertising efforts on the right people.

Compile Data on Your Current Customer Demographics

Who is currently buying and using your products? This is the best first step you can take in determining who your target audience is.

Depending on how exactly people are connecting with your business, you may have some information available about them already.

You will want to know things like:

  • Age range
  • Location
  • Language
  • Spending patterns
  • Interests

The way you go about gathering the information is important too. Some tactics for determining referral sources such as adding questions to your purchase process or email surveys, you risk coming off too strong and losing customers. Sending out surveys that will reward respondees with gift cards or discount codes when they take the time to fill them out is a step in the right direction. Not everyone will do it, but it is a good start.

You will need more than just the demographics of your audience to conduct productive research, which is where more in-depth surveys or even interviews come into play. This can help you get a better idea of what your audience has in common beyond demographics.

Social Media Analytics

This is one of the best tools available when you need to learn more about your audience. Every social network has its own analytics tools available for you to use for market research. 

Engage Your Followers

As we all know, social media is a powerful tool for marketing, and there are a lot of ways you can use it to learn more about your audience. If you make an effort to respond to comments and messages, you will learn a lot more about who your audience is. The occasional poll on Twitter or Facebook can also help you gain insights, as well as just asking your audience things about themselves in your social media posts.

Joining groups on Facebook and LinkedIn relevant to your company will also help you learn more about them.

Study the Competition

You can also learn about your audience by studying your competition. Analyze what they are and are not doing. Look at their marketing strategy and think about what you would do differently. You can also look at how they interact with their customers to get a good idea of who their customers are. This can give you some valuable insights into what you need to know about your target audience.

You may not learn as much about your audience directly through this, but you will get to see the approaches your competition is using and possibly glean some insights about how to approach your marketing strategy.

Assumptions About Your Audience to Avoid

It is easy to make an assumption about a person, and if you make an incorrect assumption about your audience, you can end up hurting your relationship. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some assumptions you should avoid making about your audience.

The Audience is “Just Like You”

Your audience probably has some things in common with you, since you are more likely to design a product you will use, yourself, but chances are good that your audience is very different than you. 

Their personalities, goals, and ideologues can be drastically different from your own.

They Care About Your Brand

If you approach the content you make with the belief that whoever is looking at it cares about your brand, you are not approaching things the right way. It is better to assume they do not care about your brand and that your content might help change their minds.

They Know What You Know

You do not have the same knowledge base as your customers, which, if you are creating web articles for your audience, is a good thing since they are coming to you to learn something new. When you write, try to provide more details than you think may be necessary, so that you are thorough enough for your audience to understand everything you are writing and not feel like your content just leaves them with more questions by the time they have finished reading it.

Also, try to write for a broad audience, as a journalist does, so that you are using plain language and clear, simple sentences.

They Understand the Jargon for Your Industry

Some of your audience may understand your jargon, but not everyone does, so you need to remember to break things down so that someone new to your site understands you. If you throw out random acronyms at your audience, they may get frustrated and stop reading. It is better to assume that your audience does not know any of the acronyms you use in your day-to-day. When you first introduce something that has an acronym, spell it out, like this: search engine optimization (SEO). Then, every other time you bring it up in that piece of content, you can write SEO, because you have already explained it to them when you first introduced it.

Conclusion

These are just a few tips to get you started with identifying and working with your target audience in your marketing strategy. If this seems like a daunting task, you can always reach out to a PR firm in Seattle to help you understand your audience.