Know Your Target Audience
If you don’t know your target audience, like REALLY know them, how can you make sure that your content speaks to them?
One of the biggest mistakes that people make is to continue to write/record/share content that they feel is valuable to their audience without having done the research to find out who their target audience actually is in terms of age, interests, demographics, psychographics etc.
The temptation is to walk into a role and think, we’re X industry, the audience is probably Y, so they’ll be interested in Z. That’s not good enough. You need to delve deeper to really KNOW who you’re targeting with your marketing content.
How?
Use the resources you have at your fingertips:
- Social media –
Find your audience. Where do they hang out? Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn?
What are they engaging with around your industry and products or services?
Use hashtags. Which hashtags are relevant to your audience? What will they use to research or what will they follow out of interest? Follow those hashtags. See what content is shared, what’s being asked? What’s doing well?
- Email -
Send an email survey.
Be picky, make sure the questions are relevant to what you want to know. Make sure you dig deep to get the detailed information that you need.
Do you have a clear idea of your ICA (ideal client avatar)? If not and you’re not sure what that is, check out this blog post here.
If you know your ICA, you should have a good understanding of their personality, behaviours and overall psychographics around your target audience. If you don’t know this yet, do the research, learn, understand and craft your narrative around your ICA.

This is all
great for content marketing but it goes beyond that.
Knowing your audience really REALLY well, better than your competition, will enable you to streamline, refine and enhance all of your marketing activity. And you know what happens when you refine your marketing to that extent? You ROI will improve significantly.
If you know who you’re talking to and you know their personality, you can in-turn refine your branding: your tone of voice, your brand personality. If you’re an established business, don’t feel like it’s too late to change because your branding is already established and in place. Branding isn’t just about the colours you use and the style of your logo, it’s about much more and once you understand and tailor that to your target audience, you’ll see the benefits.
You may feel like you’re running constantly to get in front of your target audience, to be seen and trying to get their attention. If you know who they are and adapt your marketing content and branding accordingly, they’ll find you. You will end up in the same places at the same time, you’ll hit all of the right sweet spots with them, they’ll feel like you’re talking directly to them and they’ll be drawn to you. They’ll bring their friends/family/colleagues.
The groundwork can feel tedious and frustrating but it’s worth it. It will reward you for your hard work and determination and let’s be honest, if you’ve not done it, will your competition have done it? If they have, you don’t want to fall behind. If they haven’t, take the chance, do the work and get ahead. Leave them in your trail of dust wondering what happened and how come your marketing has suddenly got legs and run!


