Every successful business and brand story has one thing in common. They fully understand their target audience and their needs, and how their audience can benefit from them.
If you can’t define your target audience, you will only create an inconsistent brand. Inconsistency makes it harder to find the right audience. What is the right audience exactly? Ones that value your brand and want to purchase your products or lead you to success somehow.
The following are a few strategies designed to identify and get to know your target audience:
Create Your Ideal Customers with Buyer Personas
The buyer persona is a visual representation of your perfect customer—the person who will benefit the most from your products or business. Every goal achieved or product that you create should start with your buyer persona in mind. This involves breaking down their interests, strengths, and weaknesses and highlighting any areas they struggle with. Include basic demographic information, what inspires, motivates, and frustrates them. Add in their goals or main objectives in life and how you and your business and help accomplish them.
Build an E-mail List with Free Opt-Ins
The first thing you want to build to attract your audience and better communicate with them is to build an e-mail list. Don’t be fooled, email is still popular. This popular and effective online marketing strategy is likely not going anywhere for a while. To grab their e-mail, provide some free product or value in exchange. Such as an e-book or free download to learn something new.
Research Your Competition
Look at your competition and its audience. What are they saying? Are they disappointed, or are they happy with the service the competition is providing?
Pretend you were a customer and create a list of pros and cons of why you would choose your brand products over the competition. Ask yourself what you as a customer have to lose or gain by selecting your brand’s products over your competition? Then look to where you can improve your brand or products to make their customer experience better and more fulfilling.
Take Advantage of Your Current Analytics
Social media platforms all have built-in metrics that make it easy to identify your target market. If you don’t have any following yet, then take advantage of their advertising platforms.
Create three to four ads, each with different characterizes and attributes, to test which type of audience you track the most. Then use this information to test the hypothesis further; if you gain more followers, views, or purchases, it’s likely working.
Don’t assume you know your target audience without doing the work. Take the time to list out your ideal customer with buyers’ personas and never ignore your competition to maintain consistency and sustainability. Knowing your target audience enough to target them with your stories is the first step to creating the right products required to be successful in any industry.
Over the next 60 days, we will be talking exclusively about becoming a better storyteller so you can work on increasing your audience engagement.
It’s a fact that the human brain is wired or attracted to stories. This is because stories are how the human brain learns, grows, and remembers things. Through stories, you can better remember important events and communicate or connect with your peers and audience. And, more importantly, through stories, you gain audience engagement and the action required to run a successful and sustainable business.
Let’s be honest, we know that you’re unlikely to follow us through the entire series, so here’s a little cheat for you – the entire series of articles as an ebook – our gift – no strings attached. If you’re ready to catch up on some summer reading that will actually propel your business forward then this is for you.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE E-BOOK: Become a Good Storyteller to Increase Audience Engagement
