The Importance of Knowing and Understanding Your Target Audience

When you create a product or service, you must know your audience. That is self-evident. The goal of any service/product should be to fill a gap in the market and solve a customer pain point, and the only way to do this is to both understand the market you’re in and the customers in it.

That’s why, in this blog, we delve into the importance of knowing your audience and how you can go about doing so.

Do You Really Know Your Audience?

Most companies that claim to know their audience, actually don’t. Typically, they will simply have a vague idea about the sorts of people that will be interested in their products or services, rather than a true understanding of their wants, needs, and expectations.

An online store that sells modern-style gym wear, for example, might identify their audience as health-conscious 18 to 35-year-olds. Whilst this knowledge is helpful as a broad framework for deciding what platforms to focus their marketing efforts on (e.g. Gen-Z responds best to TikTok), it does not get them any closer to ensuring that they provide their customers with a personalised experience.

The Path to Personalised Customer Experiences

Whether you know it or not, the ultimate purpose of knowing your audience is personalisation. Uniquely tailoring what your customers see and how they interact with your brand is what will make them feel accounted for and special. The result? Satisfied customers, loyal brand ambassadors, and sales.

But how do you create this personalised experience?

Well, first of all, you will never be able to provide a personalised marketing experience if you treat your audience as one giant block of mindless consumers. Rather, you need to segment them into customer groups based on common characteristics. This will allow you to tailor your marketing efforts according to shared preferences and interests.

Using the example of email marketing campaigns, we will illustrate both how and why customer segmentation works.

Customer Segmentation Example

Many online businesses accrue large email databases, whether they have picked up this information from an account creation and/or newsletter subscription process. The problem is, however, that many companies will run email marketing campaigns without segmenting their customer database. This will almost always lead to a campaign with a very low conversion rate and a very high churn rate (the rate at which people are unsubscribing).

Why? You guessed it – a lack of personalisation!

Instead of peppering every single one of your audience with the same emails about the same products and the same deals (most of them will not be interested), why not group them so each customer segment receives emails that are more relevant to them?

You should know the products that each customer will be interested in because you will have all their sales order data. In turn, you could group customers that often buy from a certain product range and tailor their emails accordingly. This could involve sending more emails about that specific product range (e.g. candles) or similar ones that are also relevant (e.g. candle holders).

Equally, you should be grouping the customers that have historically spent loads of money on your brand. Put them in a “VIP” segment, reward them with amazing deals, and build customer loyalty. Remember, the consumer-brand relationship should be mutually beneficial. Your customers should feel as if you care because you actually do.

The great thing about keeping your customers happy is that it also happens to be good for business!

Getting to Know Your Audience

The key to understanding your audience – so that you can then personalise their experience – is to listen to them. Your worst enemy is assumptions, so do not assume anything about your audience! Ask them what they like, observe how they act, and then draw conclusions. Do not jump straight to the end of this process.

Here are a few ways to listen to your customers…

• Customer feedback: read reviews, send out questionnaires, and get valuable feedback on your customers’ perceptions and expectations of your brand.
• A/B testing: “I think my audience would be more likely to click on a CTA button which says ‘Download Now’ rather than ‘Download Your Demo’”. An assumption like this should never fuel any decision to do with your business. Why not conduct an A/B test with these two variations and allow your audience to choose which one they would prefer? Did one option produce significantly more clicks? Go with that!
• Session recordings: software like Mouseflow allows you to watch and analyse recordings of customers interacting with your site. If you, for instance, observe that many customers are adding products to cart but often not completing the purchase, it’s probably a good indication that your audience doesn’t like your checkout process. Does it need simplifying?

The data you gather from such research should inform the design of your website, your marketing efforts, and any other aspect of your business that involves customer interactions.

Start Making Data-Driven Decisions

“Data-driven” is a bit of a marketing buzzword nowadays, but very few agencies truly connect analytics to action. We are in the minority that do. At Trafiki Ecommerce, we pride ourselves on our commitment to making data-driven decisions, whether that involves devising an SEO strategy, launching a PPC campaign, or improving a website’s user experience.

If you would like to learn more about your audience and start tailoring your marketing efforts accordingly, book a FREE 30-minute discovery call with one of our experts.