Digital Brand Strategy Series, Part 3: Know Your Audience (Anticipate and Ask Questions)
We have recently begun a series on Digital Brand Strategy. This is the third part of this 5-part series. In Part 1, we outlined a high-level overview of digital brand strategy and why it was critical for organizations to have one in place. In Part 2, we looked at the importance of Knowing Yourself as a first step in developing an effective and impactful Digital Brand Strategy. In this article, we will look at the third stage, Knowing Your Audience.
After you learn to Know Yourself better, the next step is to Know Your Audience. The point here is pretty simple. There is an overabundance of content available online. Now more than ever, businesses need to fine-tune their brand message and content deliverables to provide valuable, timely solutions to the problems their core customers experience. Brands must go beyond trumpeting their own virtues to addressing the needs and desires of those who engage with and invest in them.
Do you know who this audience is? Businesses need to spend time and effort to understand who their core customers are. Recent years have seen an explosion of tools that allow businesses to mine customer data for actionable insights and intelligence. This involves using everything from website and social analytics and customer management tools to traditional methods like focus groups and exit interviews. For branding purposes, you also need a system to turn this data into personas for real members of your audience who you want to impact. Learning the WHO of your audience informs WHEN, WHERE and HOW you reach them with greatest effectiveness.
Do you know where this audience is? Where do your target audiences commune, particularly in digital settings? What blogs or websites do they read? What social sites do they frequent and engage with? Once you identify where to find your target audience, you must tailor messages and content that is being delivered where and how they are looking for it. Neither you nor your audience is served well by generic, irrelevant or inaccessible content. We live in the age of fast, easily digestible and curated content. Brands who adopt this approach to creating and delivering content will maintain a leg up in the market. Understanding your audience allows you to strategically determine how to reach them. In part 4, we will discuss in greater detail how to go about crafting WHAT you’ll actually put before this audience.
One issue I often encounter in conversations with business owners is that they sometimes do not have a well-defined target market. Here it is helpful to think about a dartboard. The most valuable portion of the dartboard is the tiny circle in the middle. In a similar way, the more narrowly you can define your target audience, the more valuable that is likely to be for you. You cannot be on every platform and channel at once and you cannot serve every type of client effectively. The quickest way to end up nowhere is to try to be everywhere. Your highest value comes in being the right provider with the right solution at the right time. As your organization grows, you will be able to push regular and relevant content more quickly to more places.
Do you know what this audience wants? After learning about your audience and how to connect with them, you must determine what type of content they want. This is all about how well you understand your customer’s needs and serve those needs. For example, your website and social media marketing should be designed not for your aesthetic tastes, but rather to appeal to your users/clients and respond to their questions or needs.
There are many ways to solicit these interests, needs and goals from your audience, including regularly offering surveys and other methods to solicit feedback. When your clients and customers give you feedback, you must be respectful and responsive. Digital channels provide the opportunity for honest, open, two-way dialogue, which did not always exist. Leverage this to improve how you serve your customers. On your website, anticipate needs and provide answers to frequently asked questions through a FAQ page or digital knowledgebase. Offer your users a chat experience for simple questions or other methods to provide expert, personable assistance.
You can use data to help shape and refine this process by gaining insight on who your content is serving. We’ll discuss this more in Part 5 of this series. Modern analytics and metrics afford you a wealth of information, allowing you to know, for example, who is visiting your site or social feed, what are they searching for or downloading, and what content they are engaging with. All this makes you a better informed, better positioned brand if you use this information to better serve your customers with solutions. The key in all this is to get out in front of your audience, learning about and from them ,so that you can learn to serve them better.
Enthuse Creative, LLC is a Northern Virginia (Tysons)-based brand consulting and design firm that specializes in developing brand-focused strategy and creative work for businesses and organizations, from startups to nonprofits. A major focus of its business is providing training and tools to help businesses improve their digital brand strategy and presence.
If your business needs assistance with digital branding, please contact Enthuse Creative for a free consultation.
