Do you know who you’re talking to? Why your digital marketing will fail if you don’t know your audience.

Digital marketing allows businesses to connect with potential and existing customers, share information and promote brands in just a couple of clicks. It can be a quick and easy way to shout about what you do, but with a potentially huge impact. With 3.725 billion active social media accounts, the odds are in your favour when it comes to finding your audience online. But how do you know your messages are reaching this audience?

Consumers are said to come into contact with at least 5,000 brand messages a day. Social media, search results and consumer inboxes are saturated with content –how do you make sure yours stand out? We’re big believers in how understanding your audience can make or break your strategy, here’s why…

What is target audience?

Your target audience is the specific group of people you want your marketing messages and product or service to appeal to. They are usually united in demographics – such as age range or income bracket – or behaviours – like what’s important to them or hobbies.

Why is audience so important?

Having a specific and detailed idea of your target audience can help you create engaging content online that stands out to the people that matter. While it might be tempting to jump straight in when it comes to digital marketing strategy, doing so adds to the online noise – your messages get lost amongst many others. By researching and defining your target audience first, you’re making sure your messages have impact.

Defining your audience also makes finding content to share much easier with most businesses finding that audience research can help unlock a new lease of life when it comes to content creation. Knowing what your audience like to see online, and how they like to see it can help ensure you’re sharing useful or interesting information, rather than the overly used ‘Happy Monday!’ posts.

Understanding your audience: what questions should you be asking?

You can start to deepen your understanding of your target audience with just a few questions and a bit of research. If you already have online platforms, head to the analytics area where you’ll find data on who is interacting with you. This usually includes information like location, age range and gender, which will get you started.

You’ll also want to consider behaviours. Some of these will depend on your business, but you can start to consider the following:

? What is their spending behaviour? How do they spend their money and what factors come into the decisions they make?

? Where do they get information from? For example, does your audience go to Twitter for news updates, buy a physical paper or go online? Do they get recommendations from local Facebook groups or from trusted family and friends?

? What are their interests and hobbies? What do they do in spare time? What topics are they interested in, aside from your products or services.

? What motivates them?

? What are their pain points?

Finally, you’ll likely want to make tweaks as you go along. No digital marketing or social media strategy is ever set in stone! Using data and feedback you can continue refining your content to help it target and reach the right people, at the right time.

Urban Element can help you conduct audience research and create an impactful digital marketing and social media strategy to reach the people you want to. To find out more, contact us today.

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