(Re)Aligning Your Target Audience 

If you are like many of our clients, your goals for the year are centered around growth: driving sales, garnering leads, and increasing revenue. To support your sales team, you create content, post on your social media accounts and send out emails all in the hopes of generating leads. 

That‘s great — you already have powerful tools for sales enablement, but are those tools really working? 2021 is an exciting year for companies to create meaningful change to better suit their customers. The key is in knowing exactly WHO your customers (target audience) are. 

How to determine your target audience:  

Your target audience should be the individuals most likely to do business with you. Depending on your business, your target audience could be anyone. If you want to message to your target audience successfully, you’ll need to understand their goals and pain points. And to do so, you’ll need to learn a lot about them. Only then can you start effectively messaging to your target audience and efficiently generating leads.   

How often should I re-assess my target audience? 

 The frequency at which you should reassess your target audience depends on your business. If your industry is changing rapidly or you have a newer business, you should consider re-evaluating your target audience every 3-6 months. If you’ve been in business for a long time and have done extensive research on your audiences, you may only need to evaluate every year or so. However, we will say that because 2020 brought so many changes, every business should re-evaluate its audiences in 2021.  

Your ideal customer in 2019 probably has adjusted their buying behaviors in the last year, and without realigning your target audience, you won’t know what they need.  

Understanding your target audience and confirming their shifts and changes allows you to align your communications to connect with them. When your customer’s buyer journey shifts, you must be prepared to meet them where they are.  

Modern consumers’ buying behaviors:  

Over 65% of consumers across the world, and 73% in the U.S., have responded to COVID-19 by trying new shopping behaviors and expressed intent to continue these behaviors. For instance, 30-60% of consumers prepared to shop online during the holiday season of 2020 as opposed to in-store. Generation X’ers are between 40-60 years old, making key decisions for businesses and 40.3% of them have shifted shopping habits since COVID-19. It’s essential to understand who your audience is and how their decision-making has changed. 

How to evaluate your target audience: 

How does a company evaluate their target audience? Well, the key is surveys, exploring data that you may have available and talking to your customers. It takes time, and resources, but the most beneficial projects always do. What is important is understanding their challenges, objectives, mindset and, like we have covered, their buying behaviors. 45.9% of business professionals believe customer experience is the top priority for the next five years. If you don’t know your target audience, it’s more difficult to give them great customer experience, and engaging with your customers for realignment will only make them feel more special. 

Your marketing team can then elevate your channel strategy by establishing your target personas and mapping out a customer journey so that your ideal prospects have a wonderful experience with your brand. Aside from pricing… quality, value, and availability are the most important considerations for consumers in the U.S. when choosing a new brand. A wonderful experience speaks volumes.

Persona work gives you more clarity on who you should be targeting and how to best reach them. With the major online shift in 2020, your target personas may have shifted, especially with the rise in eCommerce and digital usage across generations. Personas are the foundation upon which all your marketing decisions are made, and a chance to reconnect with your target audience and hit those business goals. If you want help building out your persons or need someone else’s insight on who your target audience is, we’d be happy to help. Learn more about the persona development services we offer or reach out to us!