How do you or your employees start creating new content, updating your product's features, or developing a campaign? Probably one of the first things you think about is your audience - who they are, what their challenges are, and how your product or service can help them.
Your products and content will resonate more consistently with your audience if you know them, which will boost conversions and improve customer loyalty.
By knowing your audience, you'll be able to convert more leads into paying customers as well as improve your customer retention rates.
Why is it important to know your audience?
Knowing your audience is beneficial regardless of the position you hold or the team you are on at your company. When you know who these people are, you can tailor your content to their needs, provide specific types of services and support they need, and ensure your product or service will solve any challenges they are facing.
Knowing your audience will make everything you do more likely to resonate with the people who matter most to your success - your leads and customers. You can foster strong, long-term relationships between your audience and business in this way, as well as brand loyalty and advocacy.
Now, let’s look at some ways to get to know your audience.
1. Review current data and analytics
Get to know your audience on a deeper level by reviewing any current data you've gathered about them. Since your company has been in business, all relevant analyses have been conducted on your customers.
Perhaps you have already conducted a focus group with real customers to get their feedback on your product or service. When learning more about your audience, you already have a better understanding of the pain points and challenges they face and what they need from you.
From there, consider what other audience-related information you need to collect. Maybe you create and administer a survey for your audience to get their answers to much more specific product or service-related questions.
2. Evaluate your audience's past successes
Don't overlook what's currently working for your audience in terms of your products, services, customer support, and marketing.
You can use this information to understand why customers maintain a need for your product or service (e.g. your product development, customer support, marketing, etc.). Make sure decisions that impact your audience are beneficial and necessary as your business grows and your product or service evolves.
3. Define buyer personas
Creating buyer personas is the next step if you don't already have them. By creating buyer personas, you will be able to understand your audience's needs and wants. In addition to guiding your product development, they will help you market to your target audience more effectively.
Create buyer personas to better understand why your audience members need your product or service, how you can target and convert them, and how you can build long-lasting relationships. A buyer persona also helps your whole business - cross-team and cross-function - stay focused on your target audience so you can reach and connect with them more effectively.
4. Conduct user surveys
Surveys are another way to get to know your audience better. It is very effective to conduct surveys to get very specific answers to questions you have for your audience about your products or services, marketing efforts, customer support, and more.
Through surveys, you can learn what your audience wants and needs from you, which of your efforts they enjoy, and what they recommend you work on (and why). Also, surveys are great because you can choose to make them anonymous, which incentivizes participants to be completely honest - which means you get the real data.
You can easily do this with HubSpot's customer feedback and survey software. The use of this type of system streamlines the creation and administration of customer feedback forms and surveys, as well as the collection and organization of the results — whether you are looking to administer loyalty surveys, satisfaction surveys, or support surveys.
5. Monitor your competitors' activities
To be successful, you must keep an eye on your competitors in all aspects of your business. This will enable you to see what your competitors are and aren't doing well, how they're targeting your audience, and what those audience members are and aren't responding to. With this information, you'll be able to determine how to reach your audience in an effective way that's also unique to your business, all while saving you time.
6. Keep track of audience feedback, comments, and engagements
Monitoring a person's actions and tendencies over time allows you to understand what they like and dislike, what their habits are, where and how they seek support, and much more - and the same goes for your audience members.
Follow audience feedback over time through feedback, surveys and forms, as well as comments and engagements on your blog, customer support channels, community web pages and forums, and social media profiles. Your audience will tell you what positive and negative experiences they are consistently having, so you can resolve the largest issues immediately and maintain what's working well.
7. Try out new products and services and experiment with content
Finally, don't be afraid to experiment with your content and updates to your products and services to better understand your audience. You can measure whether your business is effectively evolving with your audience as you grow and create new offerings and features by testing out new ideas among your audience members.
Suppose your marketing team pitches a plan to reach your audience via an entirely new medium, or engineers plan to update a feature within your current product. Test these plans and see how your audience reacts if you think they are feasible and worth trying.
Who knows? There may be something you and your team are doing that helps you resonate with your audience even more - and improve retention rates. Maybe something simply doesn't work for your audience, so you can avoid investing in similar changes in the future.
Discover your Audience
It's not always easy to get to know your audience, but it's essential. By doing so, you'll ensure you're sharing content that resonates with your audience, as well as creating products or services that your buyer personas and target customers will be interested in.
Additionally, you'll be able to convert these audience members into long-term, paying customers. Take these steps to get to know your audience better and reach the people who matter most to your success.