Action Plans that Drive Business Part 2: Your Priority Audiences
February 29, 2016
By Kelly Coulter
Reach the People who are Most Likely to Buy
Ever felt like you paid for more than you used? Not a great feeling. Maybe you only ate half your meal in a nice restaurant, or stayed in a beach-front hotel room during a conference. Imagine only being charged for the portion you actually ate, or paying less because you never got to take a walk on the beach.
That’s what a proper understanding of your audiences can do for you.
Defining and researching your audience allows you to create messages that resonate, and send them ONLY to those most likely to act.
This doesn’t have to be a lengthy or expensive process. When I kickoff a new Action Plan project with a client I ask them lots of questions about their current and future clients. I want to understand:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- Who are your biggest consumers?
- If you do business with groups like customers or families, who in the group usually finds you first?
- What types of customers would you rather not work with?
- What are the biggest similarities between your favorite clients/customers?
As I talk through these questions with my client themes tend to emerge. We identify groups of customers. From there we can examine these audiences by listing behaviors and traits they have in common. Things like:
- Who are they reading or following?
- What is the age range? Does one gender dominate?
- Is there a job title many have in common?
- What are their pain points?
- Which social media channels do they use?
- How do they make purchase decisions?
- What are they searching? And what terms do they use when searching for the types of products you provide?
Of course this information can inform your brand visuals, your message elements, and the channels you focus on the most. But it can also help you understand more about your product offering. Finally, it can help you plan new marketing.
Researching your audience
Historical and anecdotal
Gather all the past customer surveys, ratings, reviews, and call transcripts you can get your hands on. Check your Twitter, Facebook page, Yelp and other directories, and internally collected surveys. Get customer service involved to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Group this information into corresponding audiences. Read through it all and look for commonalities. This exercise will expose a lot about the way your audiences think and feel.
Search
Do some internet searches as if you were a potential customer. Use words and phrases they might use when starting their search.
Pay attention to 2 things:
- The ‘autocomplete’ that drops down as you are typing into Google can tell you what others are searching. Consider the wording, syntax, and order of the autocomplete options.
- Read some of the articles that show up in the search results.
This exercise can give you some great information about your audiences’ questions, pain points, and motivations.
Social media
There are a few ways to use social media to understand your audiences. The most reliable methods use social insights in conjunction with your existing customer lists and website visitors.
Social channels provide insights to advertisers. Insights give you demographic information about engaged participants. And if you want more you can install the Facebook pixel to unlock even more information about website visitors and email subscribers.
Your Assignment
Open the document you started last week (you can find that article here: https://midlandsbiz.whosonthemove.com/action-plans-that-drive-business-part-1-creating-goals/.) Add a page with the header ‘Audiences.’ List and describe each of the audiences that are most important to you, using the questions and research tips here as a guide.
Next week we will talk about search optimization. In the meantime, send me your questions at [email protected]. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
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Visit KellyCoulter.com for more useful information and articles, or to hire Kelly for your business marketing.
Kelly Coulter and Associates (KellyCoulter.com) leads marketing programs for companies like yours. We complete strategy, websites, social media, and search optimization for companies ready for growth and engagement. We are located in Columbia, and we do work for companies across the country.
