If you don’t know what’s driving your Audience, you’ll never convince them to buy into your Brand. So let's talk about climbing inside the minds of your target market/target Audience.

 “A good teacher is like a good entertainer. First, he must hold his Audience ’s attention, and then he can teach his lesson.”

Those are the words of John Henrik Clarke.   

Every Brand must solve a problem for their Audience . But if you don’t know what your Audience  wants, how can you help them solve anything? And remember, you are the Visionary and the face of your Brand. You will be at the heart of all of your content - putting yourself out there. If you don’t capture their emotions, you won’t entertain them. And if you don’t entertain them, you will lose them.  

PS. If you’re not sure what we’re talking about here, check out our previous blog about Brand Emotions - you should start this course from the beginning!

So how can you figure out what your Audience  needs? There are a few ways. 

Demographics 

What you’re going to need to do is find out everything you possibly can about your Audience . If you’re completely new to marketing, this is what people mean when they reference a target Audience , a target market or demographics!

This is where you define your ideal customer or avatar.

Are they male or female?

How old are they?

What do they enjoy doing?

This is all important, but it’s also very surface level. You also need to think about the income, education, and occupation of your perfect customer.

In many cases, this is pretty generic stuff and not everyone will fit into a specific group.

Not everyone in your target Audience , for example, is going to be exactly 32. And you need to make sure you’re not so specific as to alienate potential customers.

So really, this is just a starting point- but it’s a great one.  

Where can you get this information?  There are some great free tools out there where you can research demographics. The first is Facebook Audience Insights - we talk more about how to use Insights in another blog post, so find your way there to find out more about how exactly to use this sweet tool.

For a minute, let’s imagine you’re a dog trainer.

In Facebook Insights, you might type in “dog trainer”. From this, Facebook can tell you the Audience ’s ratio of males to females, their age ranges, their occupation, average income, etc.

And the best part? It’s 100% free!  

As marketers, we love Facebook and Google. Why?

Because they track all of the data from their respective audiences.

In other words, they know all. As an average person, this is kind of creepy. But as a marketer - it’s great news! With just the click of a button, we have all of the information we need about our Audience  at hand. And now we can really get specific about who sees our ads.  

If you don’t have an Audience  yet, Google AdWords is another great tool. Here you can type in a keyword phrase (ie. Dog training).

You can use it to figure out the exact price of getting your advert in front of a potential customer. It will also tell you how many people search for this particular keyword each day. It will also allow me to dive deeper into the demographics of these people.

For example, can tell you the percentage of men vs. women that search for a keyword.  

Google Analytics is another useful free tool. This tool allows you to find specific information about your Audience . The more visitors you have to your page, the more accurate the information will be. And you may be surprised- many business owners say that they thought their Audience  was mostly men, only to learn that it was actually 80% women!  

Alexa is another free tool. It’s like Google Analytics in the sense that you can type in someone else’s Brand. You could, for example, type in “cesarmilan.com”. From there, Alexa would scrape up all of the data about that Brand’s demographics.  

Here’s an example of what we’re getting at: “My Audience  is 83% men and 17% women, 49% are married, 78% went to college, 12% have kids, and the average income is $120 000”. This information becomes very helpful when you start building advertising campaigns.

But unfortunately, this is still not specific enough. Why? Because as humans, we are driven by Emotions. And if you don’t strike at your Audience 's Emotions, other Brands are going to win. 

Think of Disney. What Emotions come to mind when you think about them? What about when you think of Coke or Apple? All of these brands have spent millions and millions of dollars to make you feel that way. So what emotions is your Brand striking? If you don’t know the answer, how is your Audience  going to know?  

Digging Deeper 

If you only focus on demographics, you won’t know your audiences fears, hopes, dreams and wishes.

What keeps them up at night?

What makes them giddy with excitement?

Knowing the answer to these questions is when marketing really starts to work.

This is how you trigger your Audience  to become addicted to your Brand. Think about it, people will pay $300 for a pair of shoes just because it has a Nike Swoosh on it.

Why? They’re addicted to the Brand!  

Audiences Interests, Values, Behaviors, Attitudes and Opinions.

You also need to know your Audiences Interests, Values, Behaviors, Attitudes and Opinions. Why is this so important?

Say you are a dog trainer. You learn that your Audience  is also interested in Target, Kohl’s, and Ellen DeGeneres. Knowing that you can strike up a conversation. Instead of always talking about dog-related-things, now you can also engage your Audience  with questions like, “Hey, did you see the adorable dog on Ellen DeGeneres today?” You’ll be able to connect with your Audience  better than ever.

Once you know Values and Interests of your Audience , you can let them know that you believe in that too.

Audiences Behaviors

Other things you need to know - what are their Behaviors?

Do they shop online in the morning or evening?

Do they buy new or used?

Are they religious or political?

What are their opinions?

The more you know about your Audience  the more you can delve into their mind.

These type of things are known as Psychographics. They are the types of things you can’t learn just by looking at the Demographics.  

How do you use this information?

By infusing emotions into your Brand. There are four core emotions you want to target: 

Amusement 

You want to make people smile. Period. If your Audience don’t feel something positive, something happy in your Brand, there’s just no way that you can succeed.  

Curiosity 

This is the lynchpin of all marketing. If you pose a question or riddle, people are going to stick around to find out the answer.  

Surprise 

You don’t want to be predictable. People will get bored. You want people to say, “I wasn’t expecting that!” 

Hope 

Every great Brand solves a problem for its consumers. You need to give them hope that your solution is going to work.  

Breaking your Audience into Desires 

Now we go into specific marketing. You want to break your Audience  down into three desires.

Let’s use dog training as an example.

“My Audience  wants to train their dog” - that’s a good place to start, but now you need to break it down deeper.

“A percentage want to train their dog. Another percentage wants to stop bad behavior.

Another wants to know about grooming, etc”.

Of these groups, you then want to determine the three that you are most interested in. You can then start focusing your marketing efforts on these three subgroups.

It is important to remember that you can’t be all things to all people. Target your 3 subgroups and infuse your ads with Emotions that influence them.  

By the way… If you enroll in the Visionary Planner, we’ll give you all the templates and designs that you need to get that done, without having to figure it all out for yourself. 

So how do you actually make all of this happen? 

Survey your Audience  

There are many services that can help you to do this.

Type Form and Survey Monkey are two examples. Go online and survey your Audience.

Ask simple questions like:

“what problems are you having?” 

"what products have you tried to solve that problem?”

This will help you delve deeper into their mind.  

Already have an Audience ? Build feedback forms. (In the Visionary Planner, we will give you template forms to use.)

Ask people what they’re thinking and feeling every step of the way. And what advice do they have to make things better? They will tell you.  

Interviewing 

Call people up and ask them the same questions. Don’t be scared to pick up the phone - it's extremely beneficial. To learn more about this, check out the book “Ask” by Ryan Levesque.  

Join Facebook Groups 

If you are a dog trainer, join dog training groups on Facebook. Read the walls, see what people are talking about. Use that information to your benefit. For example, if you notice a lot of people are shaming dog abusers, maybe you can attract them by donating 10% of your proceeds to anti-abuse charities.  

To wrap up…

Here’s what you have to do.

• First, make a list of the main demographic qualities of your Audience .

Then analyze the psychographic data as well. This will be a little more difficult, but you can use the tools discussed above to help.

You can also go to Amazon and search for books on the topic you are covering. Read the negative comments to get more information on your audiences insights.  

• Next, write a short story about what is inside the mind of your Audience .

Here’s an example: “I wake up every morning to my dog Bowser barking at the window. It stresses me out because…” and then “to fix this I tried X, Y, and Z. Not being able to fix it made me feel…” and so on and so forth - you get the point.  

Every time you do marketing, read your story and climb into the minds of your Audience .

This is called an Empathy Map and in the Visionary Planner, we have you do this from the get-go. It allows you to really dive into the mind of your Audience  so you can serve them in the best possible way.