The First Step In Marketing Success – Identify Your Perfect Audience

You can not be of value to your audience until you know who they are and what challenges they face. Identifying and understanding the micro audience that you are targeting is a critical first step for success.

So you are offering a service or a product for consumers. You build a website and you start rolling out some ads – right? WRONG.

The first step in creating a successful business model is to map out who you will be of service to and what value you will bring to them. It’s never about you and it is always about them. SHOCK!

The first and most critical step in creating this customer facing step is to realise that people will respond to something that holds meaning for them. They don’t care about it otherwise.

Also, understand that people have an attention span of around 9 seconds in this digital age. This compares to 20 minutes in the 1980s. You have literally less than ten seconds to engage your target in the value that you bring to their life – or they are gone.

So, this means you need to know who exactly they are and what they need to hear. Killer Headlines are almost a mandatory these days in your communications. A Killer Headline is a single phrase that maps out what you have and how it solves the unspoken problem that the customer sometimes does not even appreciate that he or she has for you to solve.

It’s the age of the Killer Headline in Copy Writing

Killer headlines hit emotional triggers and evoke emotional responses – ‘How would you feel if [massive headache just went away]’ – you lead the customer to a mental space that provides them with a positive vision. NOW you have their attention!

However, we aren’t quite there yet. We can only write Killer Headlines and Masterful Ad Copy if we know what the magic buttons are for that consumer.

This means that before we start marketing our product or service, we need insight into the profile of and lifestyle for the target audience.

Micro level targeting is the way to build relevance

In ‘traditional’ media terms this means socioeconomic level (income based), family status, media style preferences, age, gender and perhaps also industry sectors of interest. Nowadays with digital tarageting, we can go into micro detail in profiling our target audience because we are able to set up multiple campaigns targeting each micro-audience, each audience receiving slightly different creative and headlines – depending on which buttons we need to press to get the emotional response we want.

Facebook™ ad targeting for example, makes it possible to target people who have recently become engaged, people who have a baby under one year old (or between one and two years old), people who are living in family-based homes – or not, people who are in a specific industry or who have specific training/educational qualifications – the options are staggering. You can even target people whose friends are about to have a birthday with appropriate gift ideas.

To take advantage of all of these possibilities, you need to build very clear audience profiles. Go as deep as you want to – the filtering options are endless… once I targeted a fully filtered audience of 40 people. We found them – and so will you if you drill down into your audience’s lifestyle to identify your ‘Jane’ or ‘John’ or whatever your Avatar is named. Just be clear on who you are targeting and how your product or service will be of value to them and you will find success!

 

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