Defining your audience

We all want to sell our product or service to as many people as possible at the highest price, but when it comes to marketing you simply can’t please all the people all the time. That’s why you need to narrowly define your target audience.

There are many ways to help you pinpoint your audience which include extensive market research, surveying existing customers or maybe you just have great, intuitive, first-hand knowledge of your target market. You may want to serve your existing customers better or find a new gap in the market to exploit. Whichever way you choose, you need to choose.

At Yes/No we help businesses through this process and we use Customer Personas to bring these audiences to life. We work closely with clients to create written profiles of individual customers. These may be based on real-life people or they may be fictional characters. We give them names, select what they look like and write out the key aspects of their life that relate to your product.

These key aspects include:

• A brief introduction
• Demographic information
• Their back-story
• Expectations and desires
• Obstacles and objections
• Loves
• User journeys (when engaging with your product or service)

They are a powerful way of personifying a larger group of people. So rather than aiming at 40-something active mums, we communicate with Veronica who is 42, lives in Bristol with her husband and two kids. She loves skiing and yoga. She is time-starved but is passionate about cooking healthy food for the family. You may have one ideal customer. You may need to identify several depending on the complexity of what you offer, but less is definitely more.

One thing people worry about when narrowing down customers, to just one or two personas, is that you will isolate all of the others and turn them off of your business. This is simply not true. Just the other day I was reminded of the Adidas campaign for #Merky FC (A partnership with Stormzy). This is a campaign aimed at 14-17-year-old, aspiring young black footballers. It’s safe to say that this campaign is not aimed at me. However, not only did it hit home with the target market, but I (along with lots of others outside that market) also loved the strong message (and, more basically, that it was really cool).

The fact is, lots of audiences have overlapping needs, desires and tastes but by narrowing your focus you can create something truly authentic and meaningful that will resonate with the target audience and beyond.

Another great reason to produce personas is that they act as a filter and a reference throughout the marketing process. Instead of asking ‘Does this appeal to you?’ we ask ‘Does this appeal to Veronica?’. They are also essential in selecting the platforms to communicate and advertise. So before you go ahead and carry out another flurry of random marketing activity, step back and take some time to think about exactly who it’s for and what are you doing to fulfil their needs. Defining your audience is absolutely essential if you want to get the best results from your marketing budget because it has a massive effect on everything else in the process.

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