The Importance and Process of Getting to Know Your Target Audience: Part 2

As we mentioned in Part 1 of this series, there are several tried-and-true methods to better understand your target audience. We boil it down to three parts:

1. Research

2. Building your personas

3. Putting your data into action

In Part 1, we detailed several research techniques that you can employ to better understand your target audience. Today, we’ll focus on breaking down why and how you should be building out your business’ personas, and how you can put all this data into action.

Building Your Personas

When the research stage is complete, it’s time to get your customer data camera-ready by building out your customer personas. You may be asking yourself: what are personas and why should I spend time building them? The customer or buyer persona is a fictionalized snapshot of your ideal customer. Personas are an amalgamation of your qualitative and quantitative user data and serve as a tool to help your team conceptualize and connect with your customers.  Understanding who your target market is is more than just knowing basic demographics about where they live and how old they are. It’s about empathizing and truly realizing what motivates their behavior, their conscious and unconscious needs, desires, opinions, and interests.

When you build your persona(s), your customers become real people instead of  abstract data points. You’ll give each persona a name, a face, a career, real interests, pain points, goals, and personality traits, ensuring you’re always targeting the right audience. And when you know who you’re talking to, it makes engaging in genuine conversations one hundred times easier. And even better, it allows you to be significantly more effective with your marketing, which means brownie points for you with your boss.

There’s a reason why the statistics show buyer personas work. It’s like catching flies with honey! Want more details? Take a look at this detailed, step-by-step guide for building your buyer personas.

Putting It into Action!

With personas built, it’s time to give the people what they want! Use your newfound data and understanding to evaluate and inform:

• Your brand positioning and messaging

• The advertising channels you use to reach your audience

• Your brand visuals

• Your service, product, and experience offerings

• Your marketing budget and strategy

…and so much more

With all the opportunities to connect to your ideal personas, it’s critical to know who your audience is and what they want to ensure you’re spending your time and money effectively. Knowing your audience gives you the foundation to greater success by giving you a roadmap to the strategies, media channels, messaging, and services that people actually need. And that’s a recipe for a winning business.

Your message is valuable; don’t let it fall on deaf ears. Whether you would like to conduct  research or build a strategic marketing plan that makes the most of your data, Rule29 is here to make it happen. Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you better understand your target market.