In Search of Your People — Beyond the Basics of Target Audiences
Crickets.
You’re putting out content, running ads, and spending time on social media, so why aren’t you seeing any results? There could be several aspects causing this radio silence (there are) that make it feel like you’re talking to a wall.
Here’s a mental exercise we like to do with our clients:
Say there is a person in front of you and you have to explain to them what you do and why you’re so good at it. Who do you picture?
Not what do you say — who are you speaking to?
Most of us have already run this simulation in our minds, trying to validate our work to this imaginary person. While the answers are all over the place, there is one striking commonality: that hypothetical person you’re speaking with is a stranger with little to no knowledge of your profession or industry.
Many brands subconsciously take this approach when communicating their brand online. But these are not your people. You would never work with them so why try to tailor your voice to someone who shows no interest in listening?
It’s like trying to explain what you do to a stranger on the street — or your parents.
So what if you replaced this clueless person with someone knowledgeable and willing to listen? Your words start to flow a bit better. You’re not pulling your punches and you trust their intelligence to understand complex ideas.
That’s how you’re supposed to talk to your people!
Are there exceptions? Yes, as in all things, it can be context or industry-specific. Someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson can do an excellent job translating complex science ideas to the general public, even to those with zero knowledge of the subject.
The goal of this blog is to offer a different perspective to the same old ideas you’ve read before you got to this article. What you learn here will hopefully reframe your understanding of a target audience to gain clarity in your future communication.
Let’s start with the basic knowledge you can find in any other blog post on the first 10 pages of Google search results.
What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
A target audience is a specific group of people you aim to reach with your content, product, or service. They are the most likely to care about what you offer and agree with what you say.
Knowing your target audience helps you speak clearly, and create things that matter for people who care. It solidifies your brand identity, improves your metrics, and drives significantly better engagement rates.
All of this is to ensure that you don’t waste your breath on the wrong people. Mind you, there are 8 billion people out there, so whatever we do to narrow that focus is good.
Types of Target Audience
Demographics: This covers the basic stuff like age, location, occupation of your people, and so on.
Psychographics: This refers to a person’s belief system, values, lifestyle, and other factors. We like this one more because it facilitates an emotional connection with our people.
Subculture: This is a group of people who share the same interests; could be people who are into sourdough baking, politics, or even bar crawling in onesie pajamas. Never underestimate the power of culture, however random it may seem.
Where Do You Look for Them?
Conduct market research and analyze your competitors. Use all the data you have at your disposal, create surveys, use social listening, or go to them and straight-up ask. A lot of this is contextual to your brand, industry, goals, etc. so I recommend working with a good marketing studio on this one.
Contextual relevance
Understanding human wants before organizational needs
Context takes into consideration the nuanced landscape that is the individual human experience.
Say we’re defining the target audience for your AI Task Manager software for large organizations. We get the basic demographics down: people aged 30–45, holding C-Level positions in the Finance or Telecom industries, located in the Portland metro area.
We move on to psychographics and find out that our target audience prioritizes innovation over convention, is driven by numbers and stats to quantify success, and prefers autonomy in decision-making.
This already is a solid foundation to support a marketing plan, and many businesses will stop here and mark it as done. However, there’s room for more:
Context is about understanding:
What’s going on in their industry
What internal pressures are they facing
Their individual ambitions
The biggest objections from leadership
Organizations might be looking to reduce costs and optimize operations in a period of recession. Our target audience might be looking to reduce data silos, improve efficiency, or maintain the same level of performance after staff cutbacks. Getting the budget approval is a difficult task, but success could allow him to make the next big climb in the organization, and rightfully so.
The more contextual knowledge you have of your target audience, the more effective your marketing strategies will become.
In saturated markets — especially B2B — value alignment drives decisions just as much as necessity. It’s convenient to look at B2B simply as a data-driven space. The reality (McKinsey & Company in our case) says that 71% of B2B buyers expect personalized interactions that reflect their values and context.
How do you gain context?
Interviewing prospects and existing customers is a good place to start. Ask relevant questions like:
What prompted the decision to seek a solution like ours?
Who needs to sign off on this deal?
What would have happened if this didn’t work out?
Your Sales and Customer Support teams can also help to gain valuable information during their work with prospects and clients. If you work in a mid to large organization, investing in CX services could be a game changer.
Win/Loss Interviews: Talking to the people who didn’t buy from you can be just as relevant. You can find out what objections were too big to overcome, what alternatives were offered by your competitors, or what other aspects influenced their decision.
Social listening in your target industries can also offer valuable information, especially if there are established communities on platforms like LinkedIn or Reddit, Slack groups, and so on.
KNOW their industry. Learn how their quarters are structured. When is their peak vs slow season, what major conferences happen, or when do performance reviews happen internally? Are there any policy changes that could impact their work?
Industry reports from McKinsey or Deloitte can reveal a lot about budget shifts, new tech, or emerging trends.
There are more ideas out there but we’ll leave them for another time.
Aligning with Your People
Many businesses grow naturally into a specific target audience. You find something you are good at, people notice, and your business begins to grow.
Seattle Sundries is a good example: Anne attended a soap-making class she received as a gift. She enjoyed it so much that she started making them at home, giving it away to family, friends, neighbors, etc. As word got out, more and more people requested her soaps until a business emerged.
Her target audience became people in her community who sought natural products from local makers. People who care about organic products, who value small businesses in their area, and who care about the environment.
Simple as that. A clean soap made with love, that promotes the culture she’s surrounded by.
Anne’s business has grown significantly but her values and commitment remained unchanged.
Others evolve into their practice to build their own segment. They find gaps in the industry or defy the norms to promote new ways of supporting their people. Liquid Death is a good example of that.
Liquid Death is exceptional branding and marketing distilled into THE most basic thing you could buy: water. They constantly push out creative advertisements, striking packaging, and TONS of product placement and influencer work. They managed to attract middle and upper-class Gen Z and Millennials. This target audience wants to identify with the Outlaw archetype and seek to belong to this non-conforming tribe of edgy humor and counterculture aesthetics. And it works wonders.
So, where do you show up for your people? What makes you stand out from your competitors? This should give you clarity as to who your target audience is.
Speaking to your biggest fans
This article is part of an Evergreen Content Package
A series of blogs, emails, and social media posts that will stand the test of time to tell your people what you stand for.
Those Who Are Already Here
Those of you who are at the beginning of your journey might not even know who your target audience should be. Some are well-established businesses and still don’t know.
Start with the basics:
What problem am I solving?
You don’t have to think about a certain industry or demographic just yet, so focus on their challenges, wishes, or even aspirations.
Who experiences this problem most frequently/urgently?
This should be pretty self-explanatory. If it isn’t, start listening. The social listening that we mentioned earlier will help you familiarize yourself with the people who need you the most.
What makes me stand out from the rest?
This shows your unique approach to your industry — the defining factor that can be easily attributed to you.
Take Conform Marketing for example: our shtick is standing up for the brands and professionals who don’t want to have a label on them. Who tried marketing services in the past but ended up with a muted brand personality just to please the algorithm or cast a wider net. To differentiate ourselves from it, we’ve distilled our work philosophy into one statement: Unorthodox Marketing for Misfit Bands.
The people who already follow you, your current & past clients, and your prospects can help you find answers to all of these questions.
It might take some time to iron out the details, but keep at it and you’ll get there.
Another few questions we add to our client work are:
Who do you enjoy working with the most?
Who has seen the best results from what you offer?
The more clear and elaborate your answers to these questions will be, the more you’ll get to know your target audience.
Buyer Personas
Hate them or love them, they work.
Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customers, helping you better understand and visualize your marketing approach. Distilling a group / demographic / subculture to one person with a name simplifies empathy and relationships.
We’ll use ourselves as an example:
One of our buyer personas is David — named after one of our favorite executives we’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Yes, you can absolutely base your personas on real people. In fact, we recommend it.
David is an ex-military man who wants things done right. He understands the value of marketing and knows that a decent budget is necessary to achieve significant results.
Most importantly, David has complete trust in your ability to deliver.
Whenever we speak to our target audience, we speak to David. Whenever we work for ourselves or others, we work with integrity. It is our core value and so is yours, David.
We communicate openly and directly. We don’t simplify our messaging, but we do keep it concise because you don’t have all day.
Do you see how this works? You never wonder about what a group of people will say about one of your ideas or pieces of content. Your Buyer Persona is your most aligned client, the person who will die with you on your smallest hill.
Reach out to us on social if you’d like us to expand on this topic.
Your People Will Change (And That’s a Good Thing)
As humans, we are complex and weird creatures. We change our views of the world, rethink our values, and evolve with new experiences. Your brand is no different, so it’s helpful to view the concept of target audience as fluid, not static.
The people who align the most with your brand today might not follow you down the path you chose to take, while others might tag along in your evolved phase.
We often explain this concept to our clients like driving a bus: At every stop, some of the passengers who don’t align with direction will get off the bus, while others will hop on.
This mindset is important because it allows you to grow without the fear of “losing your audience”. Acknowledge your direction and that of your people. As you progress, the same people who followed you on this journey might not be on board anymore, and that’s okay.
Ideas From Us
Target Audience is a highly misunderstood term in marketing that reduces people to numbers and sterilizes the one thing that’s supposed to matter: human connection.
When you look at marketing as a discipline, it is a lot easier to quantify and assign a dollar value to target audiences. Try not to.
Your business evolves — and so do your people. Whichever direction you choose to evolve, acknowledge that some might stay behind while others will join you later on. Make it a practice, not a one-and-done project.
How granular should I go?
We hear many arguments pro and against micro-niches and specific target audiences, but most of us don’t have that problem. As long as bands like Clowncore still manage to sell out in every venue they perform in, you’re not niche enough.
“Build it and they will come”. It doesn’t really work like that. There definitely are some good examples of this idea out there, but those are outliers at best. Actively seek out your people and build community.
Should you expand a current target audience or create a separate one?
It really depends on your work. If you notice that casting a wider net is starting to dilute your voice, it’s a good idea to pull back and try again with a different target audience. It’s ok if they overlap.