The Importance of Knowing Your Target Audience

Knowing who your target audience is and how to connect with them is critical for achieving your brand's online strategy. By creating and sharing relevant content and stories for the right audience, you can significantly boost customer engagement, generate quality sales leads, and increase conversation around your business.

A great place to start is by learning about your target audience’s demographics, interests, and gaining insight about the individuals you should consider targeting online. Once you gather some data, you can begin to develop strategies for framing deeper connections with your target audience.

Know where your audience spends most of their time. Rather than trying to force your audience to come to you (which they probably will not come), consider going to the places where they spend most of their time online, join the conversation, and establish your company as a thought leader. Conversation is key to your online marketing. Make sure you are part of the conversations going on online.

Create content that appeals to your audience. Segmenting your audience by role, industry, and company size will help you understand what information is most useful to your customers. Different content captures different audiences. Align your white papers, blog posts, case studies, and infographics with the right audience to achieve desired outcomes.

Make content mobile friendly. It is important as you begin to incorporate different types of media (like videos and text) into your online marketing campaign that you make it accessible to your audience across every channel, especially mobile devices since that is where people spend the majority of their time. A responsive design for your website will improve SEO and enhance the user's experience.

Stay consistent. All of your communications and marketing assets should tell your brand's story. Tell a consistent story across every channel to keep customers aware of your brand's message in hopes that they will share it with their friends. Staying consistent helps build a brand that your audience and customers can count on to educate and delight.

Knowing your target audience tells you which marketing tools to use… Having a clear idea of the demographic you want to reach, and to which your product or service could be most useful are the basic aspects needed to form a successful marketing campaign.