n ways to better understand your audience //

It’s easy to forget some of the basic principles of every marketing strategy, given the wide variety of styles and strategies available. In reality, there are only a few principles that can guarantee success for any marketing strategy. must be well-versed in your target audience.

You won’t know how to communicate with them, or what media you should use, if you don’t understand your audience.

Let’s look at some practical, actionable ways to better know your audience.

Research in advance

Do your research and ensure that the demographics selected for your product and brand are accurate. There are a number of tools that can help, including some free ones, like American FactFinder. This tool uses United States Census data to provide key demographic information.

Do not limit yourself to the demographic that you assumed at the start. Explore related niches and gauge interest from different areas. You should be able to come away from the meeting with enough data to make a few conclusions about your audience.

Take a look at your competitors

This is a form of alternative market research. You’ll be evaluating your competitors, or at least those who have the same audience as you. You can evaluate their brand, brand voice, marketing strategies, and advertising messages.

What are the techniques they use? Why did they choose this particular phrase over another? Why did they choose this image over another? You can also start noticing what’s wrong or not working.

Create a persona for your customer

The persona is an tactic that businesses use to better understand their target demographics. You’ll create an outline for your “ideal target customer.”

This is usually a fictional person, which you can shape by adding details such as education, family, income and career, or even a name or personality traits. It helps you “talk” to your typical target customer and conceptualize them.

Know your customers personally

It’s a big move, but it can only be taken once you have actual customers. (Sorry startups). Take the time to really get to know your clients when you are working one-on-one.

What is their unique way of speaking? What do they typically talk about when you speak to them? What makes them feel excited, scared, or attracted?

These insights are not always applicable to a large audience. But as you begin to get to know your clients better, you will start to notice overlaps and can then make useful generalizations.

Monitor comments and engagements from readers

If you are running a social media strategy , or a marketing strategy as you should (as well you should), comments and engagements will be of particular importance. You should pay attention to the number of people who are responding to your content, their response style, and frequency.

In general, the more engagements you get (like comments, shares, and likes), the better off your campaign will be. This information can be used to determine what topics are popular with your audience or what messages they don’t like. These metrics can be tracked over time to identify patterns and discover more about your audience.

Social habits of the external world

You can also use , the tactic for social listening, to find out what other topics or engagements are being taken part in by your audience.

You can use this to discover new topics or angles to your messaging, as well as new ways to approach your audience.

Conduct surveys

Asking questions is the easiest way to find out more about your audience. With a tool as modern as surveyMonkey, it’s easy to launch and create a survey.

You can ask your email and social media subscribers any questions you have about your audience. You can then quantify the results or read them manually and get all the information you wanted. You may need to reward or incentivize participants with a prize.

These strategies can help you understand your target demographics better, but this is only part of the picture. After you have a better understanding of the lifestyles, preferences, and habits of your target demographic, you will still need to adapt and improve your strategy.

Your insights must have a measurable impact, otherwise they will remain in the conceptual realm. You need to have a bottom line impact.

The article 7 ways you can get to know your audience better first appeared on MarTech.