Learn why advertising to everyone likely means you reach no one.
I can think of several times when a client has come in for an initial meeting to discuss their brand and what they wanted from our work. When I spoke with one client in particular about their target audience, they expressed a desire to advertise to men and women of all ages across the country. Pause. You mean, as a small business in Phoenix, you want to reach everyone? It became quickly apparent that this local business probably didn’t have the multi-million dollar budget it would take to adequately reach every member of American society, let alone with any relevant messaging.
Today, people are so used to seeing advertisements that they tend to ignore the overly generic messages that inundate their email inbox, billboards they drive by, radio stations they listen to, magazines they flip through, and especially Internet sites they frequent. Today, people expect to encounter advertising, so it’s our goal as marketers to figure out how to advertise with our customers. This means we need to be giving them information they can relate to and connect with, turning them into more than eyeballs or foot traffic; they become consumers of our product, conveyors of our message, and advocates of our brand.
Now that we understand this concept, it’s time to dig in and figure out how we go about doing such a task on (more often than not) a miniscule budget. That’s where our most valued tool, the audience persona, rescues the girl, while saving the cat from a tree.
How we help clients create a more targeted audience
At Forty, we use audience personas to visualize the specific consumers of our clients’ services or products down to the most finite detail. This information allows us to better design, write, and advertise with the actual consumers, instead of just reams of data. Some of the details we outline for our audience personas include most prized possessions, political stances, biggest motivating factors, psychographic groups, etc. We get to this information through research into these specific individuals and their lives, mixed with a bit of gut instinct. The goal of audience personas is to cause our clients to say, “Yep! Those are my customers. How did you know?”
The personas make it easier to define how our client’s customers make decisions, the types of advertising they’ll respond best to, and ensure that we’ve identified the various types of consumers of the client’s product. Using ourselves as sample customers can only get you so far and will only end up in biased opinions.
With audience personas in tow, you can now tackle the big, wide world of possible customers with usable, accurate information that’ll lead you to make more informed decisions. And we all know what more informed decisions mean, right? Thought so.
