Identifying your Target Audience

Last week, we learned about Marketing Communications and the 5 basic steps for effective communications. This week we’re going to focus on Step 1: Identifying your target audience.

Donors, adopters, volunteers, parents to sign their kids up for education programs… the list goes on. Essentially, when you’re working towards a goal, who are you trying to reach?

Narrow your focus

Unfortunately, “as many people as possible” is not a target audience. We need to have a focused and specific idea of the people we’ll share our message with. This will require us to think about the exact types of people our products and services attract.

Let’s compare two goals you’re working towards: (Example 1) Registering more children for your education program and (Example 2) Getting more donors to leave you in their estate planning.

Example 1.

Let’s say the education program is only for elementary-age students. Who are the people most likely to register children for your education programs? Parents, right? But specifically, we want to reach parents in your community of animal-loving, elementary school students. That’s a LOT more focused.

Example 2.

Who are the people most likely to be working on their estate plans? Typically these plans are created when you’re older, let’s say retirement age. But not all retirement-age individuals are likely to donate to you. This subset of wonderful individuals are likely local, and they are either past adopters, past donors, or both.

So, in this example, we’re looking for retirement-age (or older) individuals who live in the general area who have either adopted from you, donated before or both.

As you can see, we’re targeting two very different groups of people here. If we’re sloppy with our marketing efforts, we may end up wasting time and money by trying to target retirement-aged individuals with our education program information. And, nobody has time for that!

In summary, look at all of the ways you connect with different groups of people (advocacy, adoptions, education programs, donations, vaccine services, etc.), try to spot patterns, and put them into different categories.

Do your research

Now, these categories are only useful if they help us better understand the ways by which we can reach and communicate with our target audiences. Although we can make some assumptions, having data to round-out our understanding of these groups will be invaluable in the long run.

You may be asking: What are we trying to figure out? Essentially, we want to develop a full buyer persona of our ideal audience member. Think of it as thinking of a character in a play: What’s her age, ethnicity, and location? Think about her behaviors: where does she buy her groceries or what does she like to do on the weekend? We also want to have some insights into her lifestyle: her beliefs, defining personality traits, and overall values.

All of this information will eventually be used to craft a message that speaks to them and compels them to act. In addition, we will have a better understanding of the means by which to deliver the messages.

If you’re a fan of lists, here’s a basic list of information to try to gather:

• Demographic: Age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, marital status, and occupation.

• Geographic: where is he/she located (you may be surprised to find that some of your most loyal donors may not be local)

• Behavioral: usage, loyalties, awareness, occasions, knowledge, liking, purchase patterns, how he/she consumes media, which social media platforms he/she is on, and other causes he/she has supported.

• Psychographic: lifestyle, values, social class, personality, and why he/she supports your organization

 

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “How the heck am I supposed to find this out for every person in my target audience?” For that, I have two responses.

First of all, you’re not going to try to find this information for every person in your target audience. That would be crazy. Instead, you’re going to look and try to spot overarching patterns to help you find an average of each characteristic: average age, average gender, typical lifestyle, typical occupations, etc.

Secondly, finding this information is a lot easier than you may think. You can...

1. Gather existing data

If your organization has offered this service (or a similar service) in the past, do as much homework as possible. What demographic groups are buying? When do they buy them? Which specific products in the entire lineup are most popular?

When in doubt, spend a few hours asking your customers as they engage in buying the service. As people, let’s say, finalize their adoptions paperwork, take careful notes. How old is each person, and what is his or her gender and ethnicity? Is a particular animal especially popular? When is the shelter busiest, and are certain “types” of people coming at certain times?

You can also look through any database, social media insights, or record-keeping system to see if you can spot trends from that aggregate data.

2. Look at your own network

The next time you are with family or friends, turn to them for insights. Would they want to attend a specific fundraising event? Asking questions as straightforward as, “Would an event like this interest you? Do you feel compelled to attend based on the ad you see here?” or, “Do you know anyone who would be interested in such an event?” can provide you with valuable data.

You can also tap into your network of coworkers, board members, donors, volunteers, and mentors. Ask them to carefully examine your organization and its service offerings. They might surprise you and think of target markets that you would have never imagined.

And, of course, whenever possible, draw on diverse perspectives as you build your marketing efforts. Your end goal is to make it easy for your target demographic groups to see connections between their wants/needs and your organization.

3. Draw survey data

And finally, you can always survey your current followers, subscribers, donors, etc. for their insights. Metrics are a great way to pinpoint promising demographic groups. However, I know this is not always feasible for organizations. If this idea interests you, send out a survey via an email blast or newsletter with questions designed to collect demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and geographic information. This can enable you to match specific products and services with specific demographic groups – the same groups that you should later target.

At this stage in the game, you should have several target markets, as well as copious amounts of notes about who these people are, what they care about (and what messages we should tell them), and the best ways by which to reach them.

Next up in this blog series, we are going to go over how to design a compelling message for our target audiences. Stay tuned!