The world of digital marketing opens endless opportunities to communicate with people like never before. However, the oversaturated nature of digital environments also means thoughtful and strategic planning is essential for success. Understanding your target market and audiences is undoubtedly one of the most important yet underrated aspects of any digital marketing endeavour. In essence, how can you offer a great product or service if you don’t know who you’re offering it to?
One of the largest and most detrimental errors businesses make is setting their sights too broadly. Knowing the ins and outs of your target market can help you narrow down your campaigns and reach your audiences more effectively with focused advertising and content. A clearly defined target market makes it simpler to optimise your marketing efforts and cater them strategically to your audience's needs. Understandably, it can be difficult or nearly impossible to settle on one niche market. However, this is where audience segmentation comes into the picture. Underneath the target market umbrella falls different types of audiences, all serving different purposes and demanding different attention. Primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences are the main groups you should always identify and target. To get you started on your journey, allow us to break down the types of audiences and how you can define, find, and reach your primary target audience.
Types of Target Audiences
It is a common misconception that target markets and target audiences are the same things and that your marketing efforts have to encompass each audience equally. However, breaking down your target market into tiered audiences is beneficial to optimise your marketing reach. Before you identify audiences to fall into these categories, it is important to understand how each audience can serve you and their role in your business. Ultimately, after separating and recognising your various audiences you will be able to adjust your marketing accordingly to garner the best response.
Primary audience
Your primary audience can be considered your initial focus as the group of people you are trying to reach whenever you make a marketing decision. From messages to logo design, consider your primary audience first as the people most likely to want to spend money on your services. This audience can also be considered the decision-makers. In this regard, they are the ones who see your marketing efforts, resonate with your services or product and want to buy your product. This means they will be receiving your messages directly and are likely to interact with your brand. While other people could certainly connect with your business on a similar level, unless they are driving your business strategy, they don’t belong in this category.
Secondary audience
Your secondary target audience, despite not being your prominent concern, is still just as important. This group consists of anyone who indirectly receives your marketing messages but influences the decision-maker or primary audience. Parents are generally considered the secondary target audience when marketing a product to a child. This is because sending messaging and content that portrays the features of a toy to a parent wouldn’t be very convincing. Instead, it is much more authentic and convincing to go straight to the source of who wants to buy the product, allowing space for the secondary audience to receive the messaging accordingly. For clarification, the potential for the secondary audience to impact the primary audience is one of the main reasons this audience remains so important. It’s a prime example of why it is vital to consider all the people you reach with your messaging and who may have the buying power.
Tertiary audience
The last tier of audience segmentation is the tertiary target, which is often called a hidden audience. This group is essentially anyone who falls outside both of the primary and secondary audience categories but still shares a common interest with either of them.This is an essential element of understanding your target market as it ensures you can achieve the best reach possible and ensure your marketing efforts are appealing on some level to even the smallest group involved.
Primary Audience: Who, Where & How?
As mentioned, to get you started on your audience segmentation journey, we have created a comprehensive guide to the nuances of your primary audience.
Defining Your Primary Audience
To define your primary audience, you first need to define your target market. This process is also known as audience segmentation and is invaluable if you intend to reach any level of marketing success. To define your primary audience, you first need to begin by breaking down your marketing by:
- Demographics;
- Geography;
- Behaviour, and
- Psychographics.
Secondly, you will need to identify the key benefits your business provides and how it can satisfy customers needs and desires. You can do this by asking yourself:
- What problem does my business solve?
- What customer needs does my business meet?
- What customer desire does my business fill?
Ultimately, to define your audience, you need to define your brand, which takes knowing your business’s ins and outs. That means deeply reflecting on your competition, your current customer base and your previous successes and weaknesses.
Finding your primary audience
Now that you have defined yourself and who you are trying to reach, you can specifically find who that group is. There are many tactics and strategies that you can implement to find your primary audience, but what cannot be stressed enough is the importance of returning to your goals and purpose when making any decisions. Surveying and researching your current customers is a surefire way to understand where you are currently at. Establishing a foundation can help you discover what has been previously successful or unsuccessful and what groups you should focus more on in the future. Researching your competitors is also an essential process to understand where your customers are. Not only can it give you a clear lens into what works well, but it can also help you know where the gaps in the market are, allowing you to fill them yourself. Looking at channels where your audience is most likely to be active is the best way to find and understand your audience. Considering your primary audience is the one making the decisions, you want to guarantee you are devoting your marketing efforts to the channels they are using.
Reaching Your Primary Audience
While the strategy and planning are not done just yet, it is finally time for the fun part. Once you have defined your primary audience and understood exactly where to find them, it’s time to get creative and reach out to them. Reaching your audience, no matter where they fall within your target market requires engaging and strategic marketing efforts. This means creating valuable and relevant content of interest to your primary audience as a surefire way to capture their attention amidst the oversaturated digital environment. Content marketing plays a major role in generating leads to help your reach your primary audience. No matter your primary audience, your content can be tailored and implemented in various ways to assist your marketing efforts accordingly. Common and effective content marketing efforts include:
Video marketing:
Videos are notoriously highly engaging, with 50% of consumers preferring to see video content from brands over any other format. The creative freedom that comes with video means you can tailor it ever so specifically to capture the attention of your primary audience.
Blog posts:
While written content isn’t as engaging as video, it poses many other benefits that can help you increase your reach. Blog posts and articles and extremely beneficial if you’re trying to boost your SEO, which is a proven method to reach specific audiences. Crafting careful and meaningful content about topics that genuinely interest your target audience is an inexpensive way to increase your reach and connect with those who matter.
Social media content:
There is never a time to shy away from social media, no matter who your primary audience is. Throughout the process of finding your primary audience, you would have identified what channels they are most active. Pay close attention to this and direct your social media content accordingly across the most popular platforms to your audience.Through a combination of images, video, text, and direct engagement, you can truly reach and connect with them, keeping them engaged.
Targeted advertising
If you have the budget, targeted advertising can be an extremely effective method to reach specific niches of the internet. Google ads or any social media ads offer advanced targeting options at a relatively low cost, allowing you to target the ads based on your audience’s demographics, location, interests, and behaviours.
In Summary
While it can be tempting to jump headfirst into your creative marketing endeavours, without a thoughtful and efficient strategy, your success lies in the hands of luck. Your ultimate goal should be to satisfy your customers, understand them and how to reach them efficiently is the first step in this process. To learn more about streamlining your marketing efforts to reach your audience and goals, visit our blog. As experts in all things digital, we understand that attention is a commodity and takes consistency to capture it. Contact the team at Anchor Digital for more advice on setting yourself up for success on your marketing journey.
