No, it’s not your mother calling! We’re speaking about the audience(s) that your business or organisation communicates with, and why it’s absolutely essential to be really clear on who you are talking to.
Your audience is made up of people or groups – stakeholders, customers, clients, service users, and consumers. They can be split down into groups through their behaviours and certain demographics (such as age and education).
So who or what exactly is your audience?
Target audience
A target audience refers to a particular group of people or individuals, that can be categorised by behaviours and demographics. Audiences can range from broad categories to finely-researched and specific demographics. The more defined and specific you can be on who your desired audience is, the better.
As the father of modern marketing, Philip Kotler puts it:
“There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.”
Working examples
Greenpeace
Greenpeace talks about its primary target audience as:
“…our members and supporters across 40 countries. Other target audiences are those that we seek to exert influence on such as governments, industries, intergovernmental organisations and the media.”
So we can see they have several audiences (publics) and will tailor their communications and messaging accordingly, likely on strong campaign and fundraising themes.
Amazon
Amazon’s target audience is described here:
“Amazon’s target market is middle and upper-class consumers (evenly split between genders) with home computers or smart devices aged between 18-44 as of 2022. Additionally, 60% of Amazon’s target market are from the United States who prefer shopping online for convenience, fast delivery, and competitive prices.”
Although Amazon is a behemoth multinational conglomerate, it’s interesting to see how they define their target market down to a neat demographic of consumers within a fairly narrow age range and evenly split gender
Stakeholders
The term stakeholder is used to determine individuals or groups of people who have an impact or can impact a business or organisation. They are particularly important to consider when you’re operating projects, campaigns and launches. It’s important to understand, analyse and strategically reach the people who can support your endeavours, or conversely, negatively impact what you’re trying to achieve. We talk about stakeholder engagement more here.
How to find your audience(s)
Finding your audience can be done in several ways – online and offline – allowing you to extract quality information about your existing and ideal customers through research and analysis.
Buyer personas
Buyer personas are research-based profiles – semi-fictional – that illustrates your target customer. You can use existing customer data and market research to help you with your messaging and communications, along with devising campaigns. When you’re researching a persona, you can include details like:
By creating a profile of your ideal customer, it helps you to understand your target audience better and improve your messaging and communication efforts towards that audience.
Other ways of researching and building ideal customer profiles include:
Spending the time to research your target audience is worth the effort. Knowing, in as much depth as possible, the audience(s) you’re communicating with, will help you to formulate your messaging well and concisely. It will also inform brand awareness, strong public relations and quality marketing campaigns.
Work with Limitless?
If you’re looking for help in finding your target audience, or with campaign planning and management, please drop us a message. Contact Michael Gregory on 0845 625 0820 or use this contact form here.