Audience is a broad term critical to the success of your digital and email marketing campaigns. Why is it so important?
Your audience is the group of people you’re targeting with your marketing efforts, the people you want to turn into paying customers to make your business successful.
What is your audience?
In marketing terms, your audience isn’t a collection of random individuals you send emails to. Instead, it’s a carefully selected group of people you’ve collected together based on common characteristics, interests, or needs, making them potential customers needing your products or services.
These people become the foundational targets for your marketing strategies for several reasons. For instance, they’re the people most likely to relate to and need your products or services. They align with your company’s values, engage with your messaging, and ultimately have a problem that your business can resolve.
Why audience identification matters
Understanding your target demographic and identifying are critical to your email marketing success for several reasons.
Knowing your audience enables you to create targeted and relevant marketing campaigns that speak specifically to them. For instance, targeting a particular demographic with special offers and personalized content improves engagement as your audience feels seen.
This leads to improved conversion rates and, crucially, maximizes your return on investment (ROI) and minimizes wasted effort in trying to convert uninterested parties.
How to identify your audience
Knowing why finding the right audience for your marketing campaigns is essential is only half of the path to marketing success. Next, you need to know how to find the right people to target with your marketing emails.
Here are key elements to consider when building your target audience:
Demographic
Demographics encompass key characteristics of the people you’re targeting. These include:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- Education level
- Job Sector
Understanding demographics helps with customer segmentation and allows you to tailor your campaigns for your audience.
Pain points
Knowing what problems your audience faces in their day-to-day life and how your products and services can resolve them enables you to position your business as the answer to their prayers.
Understanding these pain points helps you better articulate the benefits of choosing your products and services, enabling you to create relevant content that engages your target market.
Behaviors
Gaining behavioral data about your target customers includes gaining insights into how they interact with your brand and other purchasing habits. Finding out what they buy, how often they open marketing emails, what social media platforms they interact with, and what websites they frequent can help you build a refined, 3-D profile of what your audience looks like.
In addition, understanding more about their values, interests, motivations, and attitudes helps develop a picture of your ideal customer, making it easier to speak to them in an engaging manner.
Speaking to your audience
After audience identification comes creating your campaign content that speaks to them, resonates with them, and ultimately converts them into customers.
Do this by speaking their language using language and a tone that they can relate to. For instance, if your products and services are targeted at the 18-30 age demographic, your content would differ from if you were targeting those approaching or enjoying retirement.
Create your marketing content to directly and succinctly address your audience’s pain points and needs. Instead of focusing on your solution's features, explain the benefits to them if they purchase your product or service.
Finally, ensure your content is designed in an eye-catching and appealing manner that instantly captures their attention. Your audience will likely lead busy lives, often scanning their email inboxes rather than engaging in detail.
Ensure you hook them with an engaging title, explain immediately in the email body why they should keep reading, and include irresistible calls to action compelling them to take the next step. Don’t be afraid to build FOMO with time-limited special offers or discount codes to boost conversion rates.
Audience evolution
Your audience will change as time passes. Their needs and interests will evolve, leaving you with the choice of maturing your marketing campaigns with them and understanding how you can serve their new pain points or shift your focus to targeting new customers with your email marketing activities.
Defining, identifying, and engaging your audience is critical to your marketing success.