In order to create correct personas, it is necessary to analyze your audience as precisely as possible on a constant basis. Moreover, this analysis of your audience will allow you to make your personas live and evolve to reach a greater understanding of your audience. This understanding allows you to deliver the right message at the right time on the right medium.
Indeed, we have already seen, in a previous article, the importance of personas. However, we will focus here more on showing the interest in audience measurement and especially on why it is a work that must be done regularly and how to do it.
Why is knowing your audience important?
Let’s go back to the basics. Indeed, your audience is the public to which you address and which is not necessarily the same as the one you want to address. The nuance is there and it is necessary to understand it well. If this nuance exists, then it is urgent to remedy it by adapting a speech for the audience you want or adapting your offers for the audience you actually have.
However, the more you learn about your audience, their value systems, and their way of thinking and consuming, the more you will be able to adapt your messages and offers. Indeed, it is necessary that they respond as well as possible to the expectations of your target audience. Never forget that your audience can be divided into four main families:
- The sympathetic audience: They are sympathetic to your brand, to your products. Your goal is to reinforce the belief they have in you.
- The apathetic audience: They don’t really have an opinion about you. You have to convince them that you are useful to them, but they understand your products.
- The naive audience: They simply don’t understand what you do or how you do it. You’ll need to educate them before you can consider implementing any strategy.
- Hostile audience: This audience does not like you. They visit your site, read your articles, listen to you, but then criticize you. This is the hardest part because you have to respect their point of view and not be hostile.
Once you have understood and perceived this division, you can see not only the interest in knowing your audience but also in segmenting it. But before we look at segmentation (which we’ll see in a future article), it’s time to look at how to know your audience.
But how do we know her?
Knowing who they are is essential. First of all, you need to know that this is an extremely time-consuming exercise because your audience evolves over time. Indeed, your different actions or even external events, and socio-economic events can lead to a modification of your audience. Thus, a “hostile” audience can evolve into a “friendly” one and vice versa.
To know your audience, there are at least two possibilities:
- If you have data and your business is established, knowing your audience consists essentially of data analysis, tracking the acquisition and transformation process.
- The second possibility is that you are starting your activity and that you don’t have any data, the first step is to make assumptions. Indeed, it is necessary to start with a hypothesis. Only then can you start collecting insights.
To succeed in discovering some of these insights, it is essential to do a competitive analysis focused on your direct competitors’ audience. Know which audience they target and which audiences they ultimately reach. For this, you can analyze their presence on social networks but also use various tools that will analyze the origin and various data concerning their audiences.
This second possibility can be added to the first one to refine the data and your knowledge of the audiences of your market.
These studies should be done periodically. This ensures that you are still talking to the right audiences and that they have not mutated. So, if there is a change, you must be ready to accept to evolve, change, and modify your target to better respond to your audience (if you find that it is generating potential sales) or to change your marketing and communication method.
Thus, to know your audience, it is necessary to establish a long-term plan by selecting the right KPIs to reflect reality. But what defines a good audience plan?
What is a good audience plan?
There are several things you can do to define a good plan. First, every point you make must be backed up by data (without data, without evidence, it’s just opinion). This data must come from several sources, including your website, your social networks, your CRM, your competitors, etc. To do this, it is necessary to integrate various departments of your company. Indeed, this study is transversal and concerns the whole company and not only the marketing department.
This plan will have to call upon other plans and strategies, and other internal documents of your structure. In addition, it should clearly explain what you need to do to best meet the needs of your different audience segments. And finally, it must be inspiring to have the necessary impact on your organization while being realistic and achievable.
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It is our strategy at Richard Bulan to build an inspiring audience plan by working with all the components of your organization, as well as all your data. And we’re used to working with sensitive data, so we guarantee total confidentiality.
