Either you would like to communicate your personal brand or enhance your client reach, defining your audience or creating one is crucial to achieve your business goals. Audience building is necessary when someone or a brand would like to communicate their creative work, campaigns or experiences publicly.
We are living in the age of data thus; we are able to build smart audiences with meaningful insights. Today many different types of data guide us to see our exact audiences. For example; likes and dislikes of your customers, their age scale, shopping habits, hobbies, interests or type of the device they use can give you valuable insights about how to shape your content and marketing strategy as well as whom you should keep in touch constantly.
Before jumping into the technical side of “the art of audience building”, let’s not forget that audience means actual people who like your content once and return consciously to see more. Simply, an audience is a group of people who share common characteristics like age, like, dislikes etc. However, here there is difference between personal brands and corporate brands. Although both of them have their own goals and conversion values; audience building is different between individual level and corporate level. If you are a creator who is writing blog posts, publishing podcasts, YouTube videos or Instagram posts, your audience is people who love your content and start to follow your work in a regular manner. After you gain a loyal audience, you can use your prominence for profitable works as a creator. With regular push mechanisms, mail subscription or understanding the algorithms that make your content outstanding can help you to gain a loyal audience. Although the key principles are the same, audience building means something different in marketing environment. In this article we will tackle audience building as a matter of marketing and answer the questions about how to define target audiences and how to build them.
Why Audience Building is Crucial for Brands?
The business that you have been carrying on has its own audience out there; a group of people share common characteristics and most likely to convert when they meet you. Discovering in what ways you can engage these group of people to your business certainly will make your marketing strategy more effective and bring even more people in future. Audience building is essential for every business due to its long and short term benefits. Let’s describe the key benefits of audience building.
Firstly, audience building helps you to build and maintain relationships with your existing and potential customers. With the help of quality interactions, you can create a perception for your business and direct connection with the customer. This also leads brands to gain more customers thanks to the targeted marketing strategy. Increasing customer loyalty is also as important as gaining more customers. With an audience based strategy, you will be able to increase the chance of referrals and organic interactions which also leads advocacy amongst your customer portfolio. Lastly and more importantly, audience building prevents you to spend your time and budget inefficiently. Without knowing whom you exactly want to reach, your content and campaign strategies will have no roots. Thus, audience building is actually something needs to be executed before publishing anything. To sum up, audience building is a necessity to build relationships, gain more customers, enhancing loyalty and using the given effort and budget efficiently; but how?
Audience Building Strategies That You Can Count On
Audience building starts with knowing your audience and this information just won’t come from out of blue. If your brand is out there for a short time, you probably made your research on potential audiences. The audience profile might change on the way; however it is good to start with some accuracy. Competitor analysis can be very helpful at this stage. Try to know their audiences and figure out how to create similar ones in consideration to unique sides of your brand. Also, carefully examining the very first conversions you have and asking your first customers’ ideas by surveys or support calls can give you great insights too.
When you have historical data of your customers, that means you have rich source of information which can lead great insights. In this case, you will be able to use your analytics data. Check where the leads come from, which devices they use, how old they are, what interests they have, how much time they spend on your site. This information will show you where to focus on as well as where to improve. You can even enrich the data you already have by using different methods. You can create discount codes and ask for a customer survey in return or create mail subscription to understand their permanent needs.
As we mentioned earlier, an audience is group of people share common characteristics. However, your CRM tool won’t give you the exact definition; interpreting this data is up to you. Try to create personas. Let’s say you have a textile company and would like to build audiences for your e-commerce web page. You see white collar married women aged 35 to 45 and have a child is most likely to convert in your web page than single women aged 18 to 25, studying and does not have a child. So, married white collar women who has a child is a persona you need to focus on. You can go deeper by considering insights of this audience and create unique content strategy for them.
Now you know who your audience is. The next step is creating targeted content for them. Creating relatable, insightful and unique depends on several principles. Now you have created different personas and you are free to show customized content to each one. Don’t try to say everything at once. Clarity and accuracy can make you advantageous over your competitors. Let’s stick with the textile company example. If married white collar women are more likely to buy smart casual dresses, emphasize on elegance and comfort of your products. Create a landing page or redirect your audience to exact category by your Google, Instagram or YouTube ad. After providing clarity and accuracy, make sure that you don’t limit content with functionality. Give your audience values, the understanding behind the work you do. In this case, it can be something about challenges of urban women in terms of time and their need for comfort and practicality.
Your customized content is ready to go, so what is next. Of course promoting the content. Use social media channels as well as Google marketing tools to promote your content. The best part is that these digital marketing channels have their own defined audiences and you can find similar audiences which are quite close to your existing audience. For further exposure, you can corporate with creators who already have their own niche audiences.
All in all, once you understand what an audience means to you, who they are and how to communicate with their needs; it is quite easy to use digital marketing mediums efficiently. Audience building starts with defining it but remaining loyalty and keep them coming back require elaborate work which includes both data mining and insightful content strategies.
If you need to rethink your audience building strategy, then consider the opportunity of using our Enkronos Apps in your mix. Contact us for more information about that.
Enkronos Marketing Team
Links
https://blog.swrve.com/the-art-of-audience-building
https://www.feedotter.com/blog/audience-building-and-custom-content/
