Taking Aim: How to Identify Your Target Audience

What's your mark?

Your business – and every business – has a singular driving goal: capturing more customers and, ultimately, owning your market. Today, owning your market doesn’t require you to spend more on marketing and promoting your business than your competitors. However, it does require you to have a more efficient marketing and promotion engine in place that yields maximum return for every dollar and every hour you invest. The process of building this engine doesn’t begin with tactics; rather, it begins with identifying your target. No business – yours included – can afford to market to everyone. Of course, it’s tempting to try to reach as broad an audience as possible in the hopes that no potential customer will slip through your fingers. However, in actuality, this approach will cost you much more money and deliver far less satisfactory results because you’ll have greatly diluted your chances of reaching those whose needs you truly serve. It’s important to understand that your target audience does not encompass anyone who might possibly ever buy your products or services. Rather, your target audience is comprised of those who are most likely to buy and, therefore, become the primary focus of your marketing efforts. Identifying the right niche provides the foundation for success in all aspects of marketing and promoting your business:

• It allows you to focus your efforts on those tactics and mediums that are most effective in reaching this particular group.
• It allows you to tailor your sales message to focus on the needs and concerns that are of greatest relevancy and urgency.
• Most importantly in today’s marketplace, it allows you to build a strong community around your brand comprised of people who love what you do and happily serve as your fans and evangelists.
• And in real dollars and cents, it’s the difference between sending thousands and hundreds of thousands of postcards to achieve the same end result.

Here are the steps you should take to ensure that you’re targeting the right audience:

Segment your customer base.

Who are your customers? Of course, there are many different ways to answer this question. Often it’s easiest to begin by examining your sales data and segmenting your customers into groups based on demographic factors, including age, gender, income level, education level, marital and family status, industry and geographic location. In working though this process, you’ll likely find that a particular group or groups emerge as those who buy from you most often. This simple step can also help you identify how best to market the same product or service to different groups. Some market segments may be better reached at trade shows while others can be reached at home with a direct mail campaign.

Dig deeper.

Breaking your customer base down into groups based on basic common characteristics like gender and income is only step one. To reach and engage with these groups effectively, you’ll need to develop a deeper understanding of both their lifestyle and their motivations. Start with one of your products or services and evaluate it through the eyes of the customers that exist within each group you’ve identified. Make a list that includes every possible reason this type of customer might want this particular product or service. Maybe they are trying to solve a problem, maybe they just want to feel good about themselves or to satisfy a basic need. Going through this process will help you drill down to the specific benefits and outcomes that should be the core focus of all your future communication with this group. Secondly, think about the routines of their day-to-day lives and how this communication will be best received. Do they frequently read the paper? Do they spend a lot of time in the car listening to the radio? When searching for news and entertainment, do they turn on the television or pick up their iPad? Are they likely to be active on social media platforms and, if so, which ones? This type of analysis is essential to ensuring that you choose the right vehicles and mediums to capture their attention.

Keep digging.

At this point, you’ve established a solid foundation of knowledge about your target audience. But if you dig a little deeper, you might uncover additional information that will allow you to sharpen your approach even more. Now that you’ve segmented your market and gained an understanding of what drives your customers, see if you can identify which group or groups offer the most marketing bang for your buck. For example, of all those who are most likely to buy your products or services, which groups represent the most profitable? In the B2B world, these are usually the clients with the greatest longevity or those who utilize services with the greatest profit margin. Also, who are the customers or clients that send you the most referrals? These are your very best customers because they do the work of selling for you, so make sure you are not only reaching your existing customers who fall into this category but also others like them because they represent a group whose needs you are particularly good at serving. Finally, it would be a mistake not to examine who your competitors are targeting. This is not so that you can just copy their strategy and run with it. To the contrary, what you’re really looking for is any gaps in the market that they might be overlooking so you can swoop in and grab these underserved segments.

Put your target to the test.

Now that you’ve identified your audience, it’s time for the rubber of your marketing plan to hit the road of execution, right? Not so fast. You need to put your construct of your target audience to the test to ensure that it’s one that can sustain and grow your business. This process is often called a SWOTT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, threats and trends) analysis. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there enough people within the audience you’ve identified to support your business?
• Can they afford your product?
• Will they see a legitimate need for it?
• Where do your prices fall in regard to their expectations? Too low? Too high?
• Are there opportunities to upsell other related products or services to this group?
• How much competition already exists in the marketplace for this group?
• Are there any trends you can identify of which you should be taking advantage?

While the process of identifying your target audience may seem complex, these steps hold the keys to competing effectively in today’s marketplace. When you clearly understand who buys from you and why, only then can you find the channels they frequent and become one with your tribe. And wouldn’t you rather own your target market than merely shoot arrows into the dark, hoping one will land?

---

Attention! Five Techniques for Creating Ads that Engage

"Half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." This was the lament of 19th-century retail pioneer John Wanamaker. If you can relate, then take heart because you're in good company. Wanamaker is considered by many to be the father of modern advertising. Fast-forward more than 100 years to our modern digital era. We now have ability to measure consumer activities and ad engagement at a level of granularity that would make Wanamaker drop a lot of those "wasted" advertising dollars. But if we're honest, many of us will admit that in spite of the powerful analytics tools at our disposal, measuring ad engagement is still a bit of an art. Fortunately, there's another side to Wanamaker's story – and ours. He made up for his lack of metrics by investing in creativity and hiring the now legendary John Emory Powers to write ads for his stores as the first ever full-time copywriter. And Powers delivered, doubling Wanamaker's sales from $4 million to $8 million in just a few years – a few 1880s years. Dollars have always been the best kind of metric, right? So find encouragement in the stories of Wanamaker and Powers. Just as the search for better advertising analytics continues today, so does the reality that really creative, wonderfully executed ads still impact brand growth and sales. Here are five techniques for approaching advertising in a way that will engage your customers and increase your sales:

1. Get their attention.

When asked the secret to advertising, John Powers famously said, "The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting." Well said, John. The art of getting readers’ (or viewers’) attention begins with understanding them – what they like, what keeps them up at night, what motivates them to act, etc. While gaining such audience insights sounds like the stuff of psychics – or at least large ad firms with big analytics budgets – in actuality, we all have everything we need to get attention built right into our brains. It's human nature. We know exactly how to get the attention of other people in our lives: a romantic interest, a child, a coworker, a family member, a friend. We don't use the same tactics in every relationship but instead match our approach to the nature of the connection and what we know or intuit about that individual. I can vouch for these intuitive analytics from my own experience in the early days of dating my wife. The first time she laughed at one of my very nerdy jokes, I knew that more were sure to follow. Similarly, a parent's voice often changes in tone when addressing a misbehaving child. A friend knows just the right way to start a conversation when asking for a big favor. We just know how to get people in our lives to listen. Now consider your best customers. What characteristics define them as a group? What kind of values draw them to your brand? The answers to these and similar questions will help you identify what types of headlines, images and ideas will get their attention.

2. Tell a story.

Storytelling was the primary method of Powers. He didn't just say a product was great; he explained why it was great in credible terms that the reader could understand and embrace. Consider this ad he wrote for Murphy Varnish Company: Photo courtesy of Wikipedia. Skillfully told stories are timeless and make for great advertising because they get past our suspicion that we're being sold something. They communicate brand messages in human terms that viewers can relate to. So whether you're writing copy for a Google AdWords campaign, a full-page spread in a magazine, a banner ad or a TV spot, look for an opportunity to tell a story. Ram tapped into this power of story with its recent and very popular Super Bowl ad "God Made a Farmer." The ad very acutely associates the truck brand with the toughness and tenacity of the American farmer.

3. Create a content experience.

Great advertising does more than just tell us something about a product; it delivers a brand experience that will stick with us much longer than facts and features. Connecting ads with content is nothing new. Sponsored radio programs, advertorials in newspapers and product placements on TV shows have been around since the early days of those media. Now, interactive advertising, both online and mobile, is taking advertising content experiences to new levels by utilizing technologies never before available. It should come as no surprise, then, that digital publishing organizations are pioneering this content-driven ad future. Say Media's AdFrames placements let brands create experiences without the viewer having to leave their current web page. To promote its Mad Men collection, Banana Republic used this AdFrames approach to deliver a micro-magazine experience, complete with video about the collection and miniature articles about Mad Men style, all with the click of a sidebar ad. Screenshots courtesy of Say Media and Banana Republic.

4. Be relevant.

By tapping into a trend that's already popular, you can capitalize on people's interest in the topic to get eyes on your ad. But don't just regurgitate what others are doing. Add your own twist to bring something new to the conversation. Tide leveraged the meteoric popularity of Betty White and the trend of placing the lovable actress in slightly sassy situations to promote, quite cleverly, the detergent's ability to "Break the Rules of White." By tying in other pop-culture trends, like giving a nod to popular reality series Jersey Shore, Tide created the ultimate pop-culture mashup that positions the decades old brand as still relevant to new, younger audiences.

5. Be smart.

There's a common maxim today that says marketing content should be simplified to an eighth-grade level. But while your choice of words should always be accessible to the widest possible audience, the core idea of your ad should never be dumbed down. You can communicate clearly without underestimating the intelligence of your audience. Brilliant ads are loved because they are brilliant. They leave us wondering, "Why didn't I think of that?" I had a such an experience recently. My city is filled with billboards for a colon screening campaign. The campaign brings some positive, even light-hearted vibes to the often uncomfortable topic of colon screenings. The logo for the "Love Your Colon" campaign very simply and very smartly flips the heart symbol to resemble, well, you know...

---