In a previous article dated 20 December 2022, I mentioned the importance of defining objectives before embarking on the development of your digital marketing strategy.
It is indeed an essential element that will determine the success of your digital marketing strategy… or not.
Today, I would like to emphasise another equally important point before embarking on the definition of your digital marketing strategy: knowing and identifying your target audience.
Identifying your target audience, also sometimes called “target profile” or “buyer persona”; what does this actually mean?
Any company, or any entity more generally, offers services or products, which may or not be free. These products and services are intended to meet a specific need. For example, if I sell outdoor trampolines, I meet a need for active, secure entertainment that can be carried out independently and at home. We call “audience” the people to whom our product is addressed. This audience has common specific characteristics, whether socio-demographic, professional, geographical, cultural, etc.
In this example, we could define our audience as people with the following characteristics:
- men/women between 30 and 55 years old
- living in a house with a garden
- with children between 5 and 15 years old
To define your audience, it is therefore important to think about whom your products or services are aimed at and how they can be useful or interesting for these people.
Now let’s imagine that we are opening a new showroom and that our objective is to notify the general public of this upcoming event and to encourage people to go there. It is very likely that this opening will not be very interesting for people living 100 kilometres from the showroom.
The audience that we are going to target to communicate about this upcoming opening will therefore not be quite the same as our usual audience. Indeed, we will add an additional characteristic which could be to live or work within a radius of 10 kilometres around the location of the future showroom. In other words, the target audience is generally smaller than our audience. This is the audience we want to reach as part of achieving our goal.
To help you define your target audience, here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Where do they live?
- In what type of accommodation?
- How old are they?
- What are their interests, their passions?
- What is their income level?
- Do they have children?
- What type of job do they have?
- Do they buy online?
- etc.
Answering these questions will allow you to know which people you want to address, in other words, to define your target audience.
Of course, if your clientele is professional, we will target types of companies (sector, size, etc.) rather than people and the questions to be asked will be somewhat different. The principle, however, remains the same.
You can also rely on different data sources, both internal and external, to refine your target audience. Your client base will give you valuable information about the location or age of your audience. Data from your analytics accounts and other analytics tools you use are also a wealth of information to understand your audience. And then, keep an eye on the competition. It’s a safe bet that some of your competitors are targeting the same audience as you. So pay attention to their marketing activities and actions, which can give you some interesting information about the behaviour of your audience.
How does our target audience have an impact in the development of the digital marketing strategy?
Among the elements to be defined in the digital marketing strategy, at least three will be influenced by the choice of our target audience:
- the objective: it seems obvious that we cannot hope to achieve the same objectives depending on the size and volume of our target audience.
- the channels used: we will have a better chance of reaching our audience on some channels than on others. Seniors, for example, do not use the same channels, the same media as Generation Z (born after 1995).
- the budget allocated: the larger the size of our target audience, the larger the budget to be planned to reach it.
These are too important and too decisive elements to be defined without having clearly identified the target audience that we seek to reach.
Therefore, the better knowledge and understanding of our audience we have, the more we will be able to develop a relevant and effective strategy.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is important to take the time to properly identify, qualify and quantify your target audience before embarking on the development of your digital marketing strategy.
This step allows for better consistency with the other strategic elements such as the objectives, the budget, the choice of communication channels in particular.
You will be able to develop a strategy that will have every chance of allowing you to achieve your objectives.
At Suisseo, this step comes quickly when we start working with our clients. We can therefore look into and work on our digital strategy with the certainty that our thinking and our choices will be
based on the target audience and therefore will be effective.
Do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your digital projects, we will be only too happy to talk about them with you.
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