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Who’s your audience?
It may seem silly, but you’d be surprised by how easy it is to get the answer to this question wrong. But, it is hands-down the most important question to answer correctly as you start to build your messaging playbook.
In this chapter, we'll delve into the art and science of understanding your true target audience is — the one that you deserve to win over. Knowing who your ‘best-fit’ customers are, what they need, and how they behave is crucial for crafting effective messages.
Identifying Your Core Audience
There are 3 independent and overlapping questions to answer before you decide who you will target. And make no mistake, it’s a decision - a highly strategic one.
- What category are you in?
- Who else is in the category?
- What do you do best?
Most folks take a different approach. They first look at what they have to sell , and then back into who is capable of buying it. But this has some problems. For example, let’s take a really simple example everyone can relate to (and everyone reading this should especially relate to). If you’re in business, you know you have to get your message out there. And one place you absolutely have to get your message out is on social media. It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is, you need a social footprint to be visible. And social media is increasingly visual, so you need to either curate or create graphics or video.
Now, let’s say you’ve created a graphics platform that helps non-designers create graphics (I’m looking at you Canva!). Well, Canva could have started (naively) with the premise that since they’re selling graphics software, everyone who creates graphics is in their target market. But that would be pretty foolish. Because anyone who is creating graphics at a large company is probably using Adobe. Adobe is the category king. If Canva spent time, money and effort on trying to target the entire “we need graphics software” market they would run out of money.
Instead, Canva wisely focused squarely on what they could bring to the party that was missing. Let me use a visual to explain.
What Canva did was recognize the category they were in (Graphics Software). Then they recognized that there are other competitors in the market. There’s Affinity, Corel, Inkscape, and many many others depending on what you need to accomplish. But the problem with Adobe and others (for some people) is that you need to have a level of expertise prior to using them. And, they can be expensive for individual and casual users. In other words, there are buyers for which the options are incomplete in a way.
What Canva did better than most competitors in the category was create an easy and inexpensive solution for individuals. (Then they expanded to teams, but that’s another story).
In other words, they found an area in the category where some folks were being underserved and actively seeking alternative solutions. They targeted incomplete buyers.
Canva shaped their target audience around a problem that needed to be solved. Having a really clear idea of the problem their target has (creating graphics without formal graphics skills), and how those people are similar (they’re most likely individual creators) . . . they could go on to developing a messaging strategy that speaks specifically to that audience.
Segmenting Your Core Audience
Depending on the maturity of your company, and the breadth of services you offer, you might also need to segment your audience.
For example, at Kaiser Permanente, a large integrated health care company based in California (that I advised for many years), the end-product was effectively the same for all members. Members got their health insurance and their health care under one roof. But, Kaiser Permanente sells to an array of different buyer types, in both the B2B and B2C space. They sell to large enterprises, SMB’s, and also individual consumers on health exchanges. In addition, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, I helped them target the large segment of Latinos in the US that were uninsured.
Each of those segments has a different set of characteristics and behaviors that hold them together, which means they have different unmet needs. Thus each would need a slightly different messaging approach.
- Large enterprises have long and complex buying cycles, and are interested in offering an array of benefits while also expecting reporting on their workforce.
- SMBs want a blend of benefits and price efficiency.
- Individual consumers on exchanges will do more comparison shopping
- And some Latinos may need health care literacy content, as well as in-language messaging.
Different audiences, different needs, different messages. But they all need to deliver on the master message. Your messaging playbook needs to articulate different strategies for each.
Customizing Messages for Diverse Audiences
Having segmented your audience and understood their specific needs, the next step is to customize your messages for different segments. This is where the art of storytelling comes into play, transforming generic messages into resonant narratives that speak directly to each segment's unique needs and preferences.
And that all starts with developing your brand promise - which is what we’ll talk about next time.
Audience Homework:
Before you move on, do your audience homework.
- What category are you in?
- Who else is in the category?
- What does your business/product/service offer that addresses incomplete buyers in a superior way to alternatives?
- Are there differences within those buyers that will require you to communicate with them differently?
As you progress through this journey of audience analysis, keep in mind that this is an ongoing process. Markets evolve, customer preferences change, and staying attuned to these shifts is key to maintaining relevance and connection with your audience. When we work with clients through our AMP™ process, we ask at least annually, ‘have any of our assumptions changed?’.
Part of the benefit of an Actionable Messaging Playbook is having all of this work documented. This makes it easy to go back to your playbook and assess whether the market conditions have changed and thus require updates to your playbook.
In Summary
Audience analysis isn’t about collecting data that you can’t take action on; it's about picking your head up and looking outside the building, at the competitive market, and understanding what customers need. By identifying your target audiences, understanding their needs and behaviors, and building a messaging playbook to communicate with them, you strengthen the foundation for good product-market fit, and thus growth.
