Do You Know Who Your Target Audience Is?
Hopefully, the answer to this question is Yes. Marketers need to know as much as possible about the target audience. This includes interests, buying behaviors and demographics. It is impossible to market to an audience if you do not really know it.
The problem is that many marketers do not actually know where to find the information they need about the target audience. Fortunately, this is a lot simpler than what many think. Here are some great suggestions of channels that can be used to better understand the target audience of any business.
Keyword Research
When we say keyword research, most people think about SEO and how to create content for a specific audience. We always use keyword research tools to find new focuses for the content we create. What few people do is use it in order to learn more about the target audience.
When you want to promote something, you most likely know some things about your audience. Use that information to start looking for related keywords.
Some of the tools you can use for keyword research purposes:
Start to type your keywords into a search engine. Google is the obvious first choice. Then, you notice that there are terms that pop up. These are terms that are related and that you might want to target in your campaigns.
Support And Sales Staff
Is there someone in the company that has direct contact with customers and leads? Such people are a very good source of information that you can use in order to better understand your target audience. Your employees basically understand the problems, wants and needs of the target audience.
The goal is to understand pain points. Doing this helps you develop targeted marketing campaigns your audience connects with.
If possible, develop an internal system so staff members can suggest content topics. Your sales team can easily figure out some of the pain points and help you figure out what the target audience really wants from you.
Simply put, be sure that you increase the communication that happens between the sales and marketing departments. You can do this in various ways. For instance, you can use Yammer.com in order to create a company private social media network. Groups can be included so the teams can work together.
Forums
Internet forums are often neglected by marketers. This can be a huge mistake since they are a wonderful source of information for marketers and content developers. The trick is to find forums where your target audience spends time asking questions and discussing things related to the type of services/products you sell.
What you are particularly interested in is what questions people ask. This shows you what people want to know or learn more about.
There are countless industry forums that you can visit. Create official company accounts too whenever you can so you can answer questions for the brand. This increases brand authority.
Besides the particular industry-related forums, you can also check out the very popular forums, like:
Historical Data
Look at your best performing blog article, offer, CTA or page. These are example of pages that generate really good comments, views, links and more. They also include much information that can be used. As you know what content brings your audience to the site, you can expand on that.
Analyze historical data every single quarter. See what improved and what weakened. You can thus easily identify the topics that the audience wants to learn more about.
Social Media
Last but not least, social media is an incredibly valuable source of information for all marketers. It is actually a shame to see how many do not use it as they should. Most potential and current customers have social media profiles and many will talk about their wants, needs and even what they like or dislike with specific brands/products/services.
The trick with social media is to listen. You can also get involved whenever you feel like you can add real value to the conversation. Just be sure that you do not use social media accounts to flaunt or to aggressively promote your services.
