How can I reach my target audience?
This is the question in marketing. The holy grail, so to speak. If you as an organisation can successfully engage with your target audience, you’re doing great. So, how can you do it? Unfortunately (as you might know), it’s not always easy to get to that stage. So, let’s have a look at what you can do to reach your ideal audience organically, without having to put up a whole lot of money. We’ll be looking at two consecutive steps here:
–> Define your target audience
–> Reach your target audience
Reaching your target audience – the holy grail of marketing.
Define your target audience
The first step in reaching your ideal audience is to know who they are. (If your organisation has done this step already, jump right ahead to section 2.) Sounds easy enough, but often people only have a vague idea about this group or, worse, want to reach everyone. Not knowing your audience or wanting to reach everyone is likely going to make your marketing efforts vague and unspecific. In contrast, organisations with a clear idea of persona groups are likely to be much better at generating attention. Defining personas has multiple advantages. It makes your communications more targeted, reaches the right kind of people and makes interacting with your organisation much easier and effective for those targeted users.
Using marketing personas made websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.
1. Start with the overall target group
This might be the easiest step. You will likely have a vague idea of who you want to reach with your marketing, for example people who would like to volunteer with you or those who want to attend your webinars. So far so good. Most people know these categories but then stop without putting details to the individual groups.
You can now use these groups as starting points for your personas. Before we continue, though, it’s probably a good idea to define what a persona is. The team of Sendible, a social media management tool, defines:
Marketing personas are made using real-life customer research to create profiles of specific, individual customers that represent a key audience segment. They are essentially a profile of one person that reflects a key part of your audience.
The task now is to take those overall target groups and create these personas for each of them while ensuring that they are specific and individual.
2. Personas
There are a variety of factors you can include in your persona. The most important is to include those that are important for marketing your message. The following categories should all be covered:
- Demographics: gender, age, income, occupation, education, hobbies… include anything that describes the personas situation in life and is relevant
- Motivations: this category is easiest answered by going through a few questions. What are the challenges for my persona? Why do they get out of bed in the morning? What are their pain points (especially those, that you might be able to help with)?
- Name: Give each of your personas a name to make them more relatable and increase empathy. Treat them like real people in your team and, if you like, give them a little background story. This will help to make them more relatable.
- Communication: Last but not least, have a clear idea of where your persona might be active online and offline. A 20-year-old student might be better reached on Instagram whereas a 70-year-old retiree might be easier reached through good old-fashioned mail.
When working through these categories, consider the following overall factors: geographic factors, socio-demographics and psychological factors. They will assist you in creating a persona that is tangible and realistic. To make sure your creating personas you can work with in the future, consider this little memory aid:
Primary research
Can you conduct some research with people who engage with you already? Base this on chatting to actual people who use your services, volunteers, social media comments, etc.
Empathy
As already mentioned, giving your persona a name, a picture and a small narrative can make them more relatable.
Realistic
Does the persona appear realistic to people in your organisation who deal with users every day?
Singular
When you create a variety of personas, make sure each is unique and differentiable from the others.
Objectives
What are the personas’ needs/objectives? What’s their key need? You can include this as a quotation by the user to increase empathy.
Number
Ideally, your team can remember the different personas which will make including them in everything you do easier. Is the number of personas small enough for the team to remember their names?
Applicable
Is this persona suitable to make key message decisions, design decisions, etc.?
Example: Mental health charity for young people
- Vicky, the Volunteer
- Demographics: woman, 25-40, no children yet, earns £30,000/year, in your local area, has experience with mental health issues (herself or relatives/friends)
- Motivations: generally keen to engage with good causes, has not been majorly affected by the current Corona crisis and wants to give back
- Name: Vicky the volunteer
- Communication: Instagram, Facebook
- Sophie, the Sufferer (children and young people)
- Paul, the Parent: of the young people
- Pete, the politician to influence policy
Reaching your target audience
Now that you have gotten to know your personas, it’s time to apply that knowledge and reach them. The following tips and tricks cover a variety of ways to go about this, from fairly standard common-sense processes to more niche practices. Pick the ones that are right for you in reaching your target audience.
1. Create content and share it on relevant channels
This one is an obvious one and likely precedes all the following points. Before you can share your content in any way, you need to create it. The personas you have created should make it much easier to tailor specific key messages to each persona and distribute it through the relevant channels. When creating content, keep various communication styles in mind – text, image & video, sound. Different people consume content differently. Equally, make sure your content is inclusive and avoids subconscious bias. There are multiple ways of how to devise your content strategy. We at Multiplied By are fans of an approach called They Ask You Answer.
2. Cooperation with others (organisations or influencers)
Now that your content is ready, a great way to share it with people who might benefit from seeing it is teaming up with likeminded organisations or influencers and ask them to share it. They don’t have to work for the exactly the same cause as you are, but might be on the periphery. Especially if you’re a not-for-profit, your relationships with others and their likeminded causes can be a great asset. Find those organisations that have a similar audience to that which you would like to attract and ask them to share your content on their channels. A quick personal message to them can often be enough to get them to share your content and, thus, lead people to your page.
Example: a mental health charity might partner with an influencer who is dedicated to help people get rid of their debt and become financially healthy. Financial worries can cause mental health issues and, thus, a partnership might reach the right kind of people. Both parties (and users) will likely benefit from this cooperation.
Another potent way to work together is to plan content together or involve others in your creation process. Let’s say you’re that mental health charity we just mentioned and you’re writing a blog post about reasons for mental health issues in adults. You want to talk about 5 different reasons, for example health, financial worries, loneliness, etc. Why not find an organisation or influencer for each of these reasons and get a quote from them that you can incorporate in your post? Not only does this increase the expertise of the article, but you will now likely reach each of their audiences when they share the finished post with their following. (This is also brilliant for your SEO!)
3. Guest contributions
The previous point can be taken one step further. Getting guests involved in your content creation can be expanded to asking them to create a full piece of content for you. This has multiple advantages: you are getting fresh perspectives, devoting less time and resources to creating content and – most importantly in this context – likely getting someone from outside your organisation but in a similar field. When they share this piece of content with their networks and introduce your organisation to them, it’s a win-win for everyone. Equally, guest contributions don’t have to be by experts or professionals. You can easily ask someone who is involved in your organisation as a volunteer, for example, to do a social media take over and lead the content for a day or two.
4. #UseHashtags (#LearnHowToUseThemFirst) #Hashtag
Hashtags are a science in themselves and we don’t have the space here to go into detail. Basically, a hashtag serves to contextualise and group certain posts together. People follow hashtags that they are interested in and, if your post uses that hashtag, will see your content even if they don’t follow you specifically. The number of hashtags to use varies on each platform. For example, Instagram allows up to 30 tags and many people utilise this, whereas 30 hashtags on Twitter would not be rewarded. If you’re keen on upping your hashtag game, check out this or this post.
5. Comment on people’s posts and questions
Another fairly easy way to engage with your target audience is to, well, engage with them. Follow relevant hashtags, organisations and influencers yourself and engage with their content. Try to not just advertise your organisation in each comment/engagement, but just engage in conversation to topics that might relate to your cause. Like others’ posts, follow relevant organisations yourself and maybe join a group or two on Facebook/LinkedIn to engage on a certain topic on a deeper level.
6. Invite people who like a post to like your page
This tip is Facebook-specific. The platform has a great functionality whereby you can invite people to like your page if they have liked a piece of your content. This works great if one of your followers has shared your content which is then liked by their followers. You can now ask that follower to like your page. Easy. From experience, the majority of people will follow that invitation because they have already shown an interest in you by liking your content in the first place.
7. Look at what others in your field are doing
If you’re looking for more ways to engage with target audiences, have a look at what ‘the competition’ is doing. What creative ways have other organisations found to engage their target audiences? You won’t be able to see what they’re doing behind the scenes, but if they are collaborating with others or devising creative ways to engage more interested people, it’s likely going to show on their channels. Don’t hesitate to talk to people and ask them what they are doing. This might be easier if you start with someone who is on the periphery of what you do, thus not directly considered competition. Have a chat and share ideas.
8. Chat to existing users
Similarly to the previous point, chatting to your own followers and service users can give you helpful insight. How have they found you? Why have they started engaging with you? Their answers might surprise you and help you focus your content strategy more clearly.
Whatever you do, just get started. Some of the points mentioned here require quite a bit of work, others less so. Mainly, it’s important to get started and spend some time up front to make sure your personas and content strategy are based on solid footing. These things will get easier and become second-nature over time. If you want to have a chat about reaching your target audience and want to get serious about this part of your strategy, get in touch and we’ll see how we can help.
3 reasons to use a retained design service
Once you’ve got your new brand and website sorted you might think: “Right, that’s me. I can now do everything myself with the assets I have available.” Whereas that is probably true to some extent, it is worth considering whether staying with your creative agency and using them as a resource for design-related requirements would not only provide you with high-quality consistent design but also with a relationship that would lighten your daily load and grow closely over the years. The reasons to keep a retained design service are various.
Consistency
Consistency within your brand is absolutely vital in your communications to make your organisation recognisable to users and customers. Having brand guidelines written down and ensuring your team follows them will get you half-way there. But most often creating new assets from those guidelines can still be tricky as those guidelines can’t account for every potential design need.
You could say you don’t care, or you could commission a variety of service providers across a variety of creative disciplines to keep your design in check. But by far the best choice to keep things consistent is to have retained design service that does all your creative work. It will ensure that across all your channels and content your brand and voice is coherent and consistent. This agency will grow with you and really get to know your needs and voice when communicating with your ideal client/user.
Value for money
While any retained relationship accounts for peaks and troughs in work, generally, retained clients get more hours than they pay for as latitude is earned through the long-term relationship. That means more value for your money. Additionally, keeping a retained agency has the advantage of not having to induct a new person/agency to your organisation and brand whenever you need a design job to be done. Your retained agency will already know you and will easily be able to convert your requirements into beautiful assets that speak with your voice.
Agility
Last but not least, the relationship that you develop with your retained design agency presents an opportunity to develop trusted partnerships where work can be produced both proactively and reactively. With an established understanding and compiled assets, the agency can respond quickly to creative requirements across a range of platforms.
If you are thinking about getting a retainer with an agency, why not check our post about our values to see if we’re a good fit for you? Or drop us a message directly.
Video marketing for SMEs – why should I care?
If a picture tells a thousand words, let’s consider what 30 frames per second can achieve.
Video marketing is a tremendously effective communications tool and one that is increasingly accessible to small and medium sized businesses. With everyone spending more time online and being time poor, being able to communicate complex issues and brand personality can be rapidly accomplished with video that page copy and photography cannot. Even before the pandemic, the average person watched more than an hour and a half of online video content per day. This will undoubtedly have increased in the last 12 months.
With this in mind and with our unashamed love for creating video content, it can be no surprise that we highly recommend video marketing for small businesses and destination projects. Video has the ability to accomplish multiple brand objectives:
- Develop brand awareness
- Cross platform online presence
- Reveal brand personality
- Ignite social media interaction
- Build trusting relationships
- Cost effective production
Destination projects
When we work with clients in destination markets, what we hear time after time is “show me, don’t tell me”. And it’s true. Can you imagine visiting a hotel in Spain after reading a brochure that has no images? We are not booking that fortnight in the sun. Now, compare that to one that has a short video giving a tour of the living accommodation, some panning shots of the locality and an aerial shot of activities available close by, all brought together within a professional and authentic brand? Which do you think best articulates the benefits and is more likely to gain your trust and your booking? Video wins because video works. We have trust that they are showing us the best that experience has to offer. We can see ourselves cosying up in front of that fire or dusting off the cobwebs by taking a long leisurely walk along that stunning, white sand beach.
Food and Hospitality projects
As we note above, marketing is most effective when we can allow customers to place themselves in the experience. The food and hospitality sector has a proud reputation for producing stunning product photography and this can be hugely effective. However, until Microsoft or Google create smell-o-vision or taste technology, video is the next best thing. Video can present a picture that photography cannot: this could be a slow motion shot of a chef seasoning prime rib before it is served, steam gently meandering upwards, to a visibly pleased customer. We could be flying a drone across the blooming field of wheat as the farmer harvests the produce that will be baked in a local bakery. From farm field to the final frame, we can tell a story of quality produce and quality producers in a way that other mediums cannot. Not only that, we also make sure they are presented in their brand and with a voice they want to communicate in.
Small Businesses
Video helps small look big. The massive jump forward in the quality of accessible technology means that, with a relatively modest budget and a creative flair, growth businesses can compete for profile with the big players. Indeed, because many smaller enterprises rely so heavily on the personality of a founder, it allows these businesses to have the best of both worlds – a personal touch with a professional polish. On top of that, it gets your brand and business voice out there in only a few minutes.
Effective Medium
We have already established that it is powerful in presenting a story. What really makes it stand out is its ability to engage customers and clients. Like-for-like posts that use video over images or no creative at all are many more times likely to be reacted to, commented on and shared. This is the exponential effect of video.
Brand. Trust. Effectiveness. There is little not to like about using video.