As you may recall, in my last post I talked about why it is important to know who your audience is before planning strategies, writing papers and even making websites. In this post, I hope to show you the best ways to determine who your audience is and how you can reach them so you can get the correct message across to the right people.
There are many ways to determine who your audience is, the easiest being to simply ASK! By asking directly you can find out what peoples likes and dislikes are then go from there. Another good idea is to create a poll. Creating a poll is great because the answers are always accurate as long as you word the questions correctly and don’t make the them too confusing. You can also sign up for a site such as Google Analytics and find out where people are coming from to get to you and what your most popular pages are when determining your audience for your website. You can also click on the links of people that have commented on your website and see what their site is like to get an idea of who they are.
Once you have an idea of who your audience is, you still need to reach out to them. In the book, What Sticks, the authors talk about how to reach your consumer from the standpoint of an advertiser. According to them, the key to reaching your audience is knowing what motivates them to come to you, what the consumer is actually hearing from your message because it might be different then what you want to be saying, knowing which medium to use to connect with the majority of your audience and finally maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing.
If you are still having trouble determining your audience, my next post will be about the different types of audiences out there and which one may be right for you.
2 responses so far ↓
Chelsea Nuzum // March 5, 2009 at 11:22 pm |
I think that determining your audience sounds a lot easier than it actually is. It is very hard to know how to reach people unless you do the actually research. I think that polling is a very good idea for skimming the surface. However, the “What Sticks” book presents a great way of developing and reaching a target audience with the four M’s they discuss. Having a strategy to implement and follow is a great way to think of targeting an audience because following steps is a more thorough approach than trying to bridge gaps in what the audience needs are and your means of reaching them.
Christopher Runyon // March 16, 2009 at 12:40 pm |
I might have to disagree with Chelsea and that it is a lot easier now to actually find a specific audience. There are so many connections being made to consumers that of their interest and will want to read. Take Facebook for example, they must have a system of key-words for advertising and marketing for their banner ads. I love snowboarding and get twenty different ads about snowboarding materials, sites, and trips. When you understand consumers motivates and see their “high traffic” areas of interest, it will shoot your marketing sky high. Google Analytics’ is pretty nifty tool too. Advertisements are coming to consumers, we don’t have to look for them any longer. Niche audience are being found whether they like it or not.