31 October Marketing Insights: The Importance of Finding Your Audience October 31, 2023 By sma Marketing, Social Media business website, client satisfaction, digital marketing, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, money management, paid search 0 MARKETING INSIGHTS: THE IMPORTANCE OF FINDING YOUR AUDIENCE October 31, 2023 | Marketing, Social Media | client satisfaction, money management, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, digital marketing, paid search, business website By Zach Vesper, NPI, Inc.'s Senior SEO & Marketing Strategist Any experienced marketer, when speaking about how to grow a business and reach long-term goals, will preach on how important it is for a business to find its audience. For many business owners, this might sound a little strange. After all, shouldn’t entrepreneurs be looking to find as many clients or customers as possible in order to convert on leads and maximize their sales? Of course this is true! But this doesn’t mean that the best marketing strategy is to speak to everyone all at once. Imagine you’re making a speech in a massive auditorium. For most people, the more people there, the more difficult it will be to capture everyone’s attention. If too many people are there, the audience further in the back will struggle to see you, and even the most expensive sound equipment will start to fail, leaving your message completely unheard to many. In the same way, marketing to a massive audience tends to be expensive, and a business that chooses to market in this manner can often see their message lost, becoming indiscernible as it competes with too many other businesses for attention. Instead of wasting money, time, and energy on expansive marketing, businesses should focus on finding their niche audience. What is a niche audience? A niche audience is a highly specific audience that consists of people who are uniquely in need of a business’ services or products, usually identified through intensive research as well as a good amount of trial and error. Small businesses that are looking to maximize the value of their advertising budget particularly benefit from identifying their niche audience because it usually translates to more conversions per dollar spent. When targeting a smaller audience, marketers don’t have to keep their messaging as generic in an attempt to avoid alienating parts of their audience. In fact, the action of bringing up information that’s hyper-specific to a niche audience is more likely to be memorable, increasing brand recall, inspiring more engagement, and building overall loyalty. In short, modeling marketing collaterals and campaigns to a specific audience is easier, more effective, and much more likely to leave a long-lasting impact. On the other side of the equation, consider what can happen when advertising reaches an audience that doesn’t find the service relevant to them (such as when men see ads for women’s hair products, or when dog owners see ads for cat food). These situations can lead to some frustration from the unintended audience, and worse, many accidental clicks on your ads from those who aren’t actually interested in what you’re selling. Since the cost of many paid ads are based on the number of clicks you get and not actual leads or conversions, this situation also results in a waste of your ad spend. In many ways, finding a niche audience is the key to effective marketing, but identifying this group can be difficult, requiring plenty of time and a strong understanding of a business’s industry. How do you find your niche audience? One great way to start identifying your niche audience is to develop an audience “persona,” or the ideal customer for your business. Consider their demographic information, their age range, gender, education, and income level, then get as detailed as possible. Not only does creating this picture allow for a clearer target when writing website copy or designing advertising graphics, many forms of advertising can filter out individuals who don’t fit into these demographics. In addition to this, businesses can use their existing audience to find commonalities based on website and social media analytics. Do your most frequent customers match your “ideal customer”? If not, this could either be because you’ve misidentified your niche audience, or there’s a key group you’ve been overlooking. After completing these two steps, consider what your most direct competition is doing. How do their marketing efforts differ from your own, and what strategies seem to garner the most success? By knowing who they are “speaking” to, businesses can be much more intentional in their marketing, increasing their profits by spending less money and speaking to fewer people. How do you market to a niche audience? With a specific audience in mind, generate social media posts, infographics, videos, and other web content tailored for their interests, culture, or humor in particular. When it comes to focusing efforts on social media, businesses should seek to inhabit similar spaces that their niche audience occupies, partnering with other tangential businesses, or possibly influential local creators. With tailored content, expect more reviews and engagement online - then be sure to respond to these interactions and react to feedback. Improving your product or services specifically for this key audience becomes much easier when conversations open up through these channels. One note of warning! Although unlocking a new audience or a key niche audience can be exciting, it’s important that businesses don’t forget to try to branch out from time to time into new audiences. Marketing to a niche audience is important to gain traction, but entrepreneurs can see their business become stagnant if they never break out of their comfort zone. Experimentation and research should always be embraced by business owners looking to increase their market share. To further strategize how to start your next campaign, contact your NPI marketing team to get the discussion rolling! Curious about the resources gained when franchising with NPI? Click here to get your free info packet. About the Author Zach Vesper, Senior SEO & Marketing Strategist Zach brings twelve years of content marketing and nine years of search engine optimization (SEO) experience to the NPI in-house marketing team. His areas of expertise include building marketing plans that increase franchise sales, optimizing web content for search, crafting effective paid search campaigns, reputation management, and content strategy. Zach is always more than happy to answer your questions about all things Google and considers this the most important and enjoyable aspect of his job. Comments are closed.