Buyer Personas and Audiences: How to focus your Marketing

Marketing as an idea is almost synonymous with business these days, so when business owners consider their marketing plans, they often want to to sell to everyone, everywhere. It makes sense, where is one most likely to find customers? The entirety of the whole human race, probably. Unfortunately, organising an audience for an advertising or marketing campaign often needs just a little more work, especially if you’re trying to communicate with demographics like millennials, or Generation Y- an effort that we've explored the difficulty of before. Failing to target your advertising is much like cooking a delicious, mouth-watering roast lamb for a dinner party, then inviting all your vegetarian friends for dinner. Beyond looking like a bit of a psychopath, you risk offending your vegetarian compadres, and you’re either going to have to bin the meal or skip dessert and just go to town, all by yourself. In short, businesses need to define a target audience in order to sell their products to people who actually want to buy it.

We <3 Buyer Personas

We at the Raiders are firm believers in the idea of making Buyer Personas- semi-fictional representations of who you think your ideal customer would be. Setting up an audience under a Buyer Persona gives your campaign a focus, a very specific group subset that you can use to tailor all of your communication. If you’d like to learn how to set up a Buyer Persona, check out our Buyer Persona Creator to make your own.

Why making a Buyer Persona or Audience is necessary

So why specifically should you restrict your market to a targeted group? Selecting a target market allows businesses to craft messages that appeal specifically to that target; for example, a lipstick marketer would probably sell more if they aimed their marketing at a females, 16 years and older, given that not a particularly large number of men or children wear lipstick. To take it even further, within your lipstick-wearing female category, are sub-categories which even further define the audience; a younger audience might prefer to wear bold and dramatic colours whereas more mature women might prefer more natural colours. Alternatively, marketing to everybody in general is, more often than not, a huge waste of time, money and effort as many businesses do not have the time or resources to reach to everybody. Identifying a target market allows marketers to focus on those most likely to purchase the product, improving conversion rates and sales dramatically. As an added bonus, when you’re specific about your target market, you are more likely to make an impact improving your perception as a brand to those that feel like you just… get them, you know?

Don’t feel as though targeting a specific market does not mean that you are cutting loose any people who do not fit into your criteria, however. Rather, the art of targeted marketing allows you to focus your money and brand message to a specific list of people, or even better, multiple lists of people, who are likely to buy from you, making it a more affordable, efficient, and effective way to reach potential clients and generate business. Targeting also allows you to direct your depending on how committed to buying an individual may be- something we cover more in our article on the Buyer's Journey. 

Don’t be a spam pusher

While defining a target market is the tricky part, once you know who you are targeting, it is much easier to figure out which media you can use to reach to them and what marketing messages will be relevant using the right tone, language, and attitude to appeal to your best prospects. The alternative, mass-advertising to everybody even if they have no interest at all in the product, is how your marketing quickly becomes classified as spam, which is just super bad for a brand. A brand that consistently has their content marked as spam will quickly find their advertising options drying up- no one wants to help push spam to people.

So when it comes time for you to set up your next campaign, take the time to properly set up a targeted audience that will help you get specific, interested folks through the door instead of any old riff-raff. You’ll start seeing an improvement in your sales in no time flat.