Reaching Your Target Audience: Where Should you Pay your Attention?
It doesn’t matter if you’re working freelance or as a part of some company, launching a successful marketing campaign can be a challenging thing. The one thing that you need to know for sure before you start with the campaign itself is to be aware of your target audience.
Now, this may seem like an obvious thing, but you’d be surprised by how many companies out there don’t exactly know their target audience, which makes their campaigns unlikely to succeed from the very start.
In order to successfully offer your products or services to people, you have to know how to detox those who are not interested.
How to pinpoint your target audience?
Pinpointing your target audience is crucial, but it can also be a very big challenge especially for small businesses that have very limited funds to pursue these types of marketing campaigns. That’s why the most essential thing that you can do is to talk to your potential customers. They're a part of your target audience. The simple truth is that you can’t market something to people without knowing who those people are exactly.
The first thing that you need to do to get to your target audience is to define it. You need to have a clear picture that will help you out with targeting only those people that could be potential customers. The way to go about it is to pay attention to some characteristics that they possess. Look at:
Demographics - Who is your target audience? What is their age? Gender, income, profession? Where do they come from?
Psychographics - What is the way they’re thinking? What are their hobbies and interests? What do they like or dislike?
Behavioral - where are they present on the internet? Do they prefer offline or online? What sites or media platforms do they use mostly?
A good exercise that you can do to figure out who your target audience is and how to form your marketing campaigns is thinking about your perfect target customer. Write down a thorough description of what they might look like and you will be close to knowing your target audience.
Targeting your audience
Relevant content
The simplest and most honorable way to reach your target audience is by posting relevant content that your consumers find useful. This can be a challenging thing because you have to know what they find relevant in the first place and which topics are currently trendy. Some methods that you can use are video marketing, blog posts and articles, and social media content. Providing high-quality, interactive and engaging content via all these channels and types of content can bring some results when used properly and according to your audience.
Referral marketing
Use the referral system to expand your company’s reach. Give out referral codes to your customers with which you will give them an incentive to share the content with others. It broadens your reach and audience with lower investments.
Hashtags
Use hashtags that will point your audience in the right direction when it comes to your content. Relevant hashtags do help out with increasing the reach of your content and getting to people who are interested in that type of content. Use specific hashtags, while at the same time, keeping them as simple as possible.
Get help
If you know influencers or vloggers/bloggers that have a lot of your targeted customers as their following it’s wise to ask for a collaboration. Contacting these types of people and doing sponsored posts about what you’re offering can be a game-changer for you. You can offer free samples for exchange that they will promote.
Other things that you can do include targeted advertising, partnering with other brands, being a part of special events. But be sure that your audiences are in-line.
Mary Walton is a professional editor, content strategist and a part of NCSM team. Apart from writing, Mary is passionate about hiking and gaming. Feel free to contact her via Facebook.