How to Define Your Audience

Let me explain…

As you may know, we’ve been writing toolkits trying to cover all the business questions we both get asked a lot. Unfortunately I can’t reply to all the emails asking for advice anymore – I’m so sorry, I wish I could but it got to a stage where I’d spend hours replying to people with advice and half the time people wouldn’t even respond! Helen rightfully told me I needed to stop and we came up with this solution to combine our knowledge, create PDF versions of all our advice and sell them at an affordable price so it would cover our time.

We started with the Define Your Brand toolkit (which was my best selling product across the whole website last year! Thank you!) Then this year we released the Planning and Time Management toolkit – and although we don’t often get asked specifically about how to define your audience it’s normally the answer to a lot of questions (….Does that make any sense?!) Basically the root of quite a few business problems is that brands don’t understand/know who their audience is, therefore it’s hard to sell and connect with people who aren’t ‘your people’. The problem might be that they can’t grow their audience or their products are selling well and it’s normally that you’re not ‘targeting’ (I hate that word) the right crowd.

It’s often overlooked because it feels like a drag and because it can feel so illusive… Who are they? how do you know? but once you figure it all out, it’s so much easier to find and relate to your audience…and therefore to ‘sell’ to them which is ultimately every businesses goal.

Why should you define your audience?

Granted, it sounds dull AF but I promise it’s a) not that boring and b) super important for a business to understand who their audience is. It does take a bit of time (I think it takes me about 3 hours every time and I try to assess it at least once a year) So why bother? Well because if we don’t know who our customers are then how can we expect them to find us? It’s like quietly publishing a website and just assuming the world will come looking for us. It doesn’t happen like that, you need to find them and you need to let them know/give them a reason to love you back. Once they do they’ll invest in you – with their time, money and support which is the entire point of running a business.

So we want to speak to people but equally they need to be the RIGHT people (for us) …When we advertise and speak to the wrong people it’s not only fruitless but frustrating, all that energy and content and possibly money being wasted on an audience who aren’t your customer. They’ll never invest in your business so it’s effectively like talking to a brick wall, and there are better ways to spend your time. Your audience are certain people – of course they’re all different and unique (we’ll talk about that next) but they’re a collection of individuals who you want to speak to, if you’re just speaking to ‘the internet’ without focusing on them you’ll be putting out a lot more effort than you need to. The sooner you see them and focus on them, the sooner your message will resonate with them and pay off so you can spend less energy/time/money and just focus some of your efforts in the right place rather than all of it in the wrong places.

Y’know when people say ‘it’s not about the numbers’ on instagram – it’s totally that. The numbers are good at marking achievements, we can’t deny it’s fun to hit a certain follower count because it’s always good to talk to more people – when they’re the right people…. but if they’re all bots/fake account/people who aren’t actually interested then it’s totally pointless wasting good content on them. It’s better to have 500 people who are invested than 50,000 who couldn’t care less.

How do you define your audience?

So the ‘How’ is often the bit the people struggle with. Hopefully it’s now clear why we should figure out who your audience is, but how do you do that? It used to feel to me like – They all seem like such different and unique people so how do you select just one of them and decide he/she is who you’ll be speaking to from now on? We’ll you don’t – you don’t choose one and run with them, because they are different so you’ll still be missing out loads of them. Instead, you collect relevant information about all of them and then you build a customer in your mind. A bit like a really good recipe, collecting different ingredients from a variety of places and then putting it altogether to create a bloody lush …(I want to say toad in the hole because that’s my favourite meal, but it doesn’t feel elegant enough to compare our customers to a toad in the hole so ….) we mix all those ingredients to create a gorgeous *insert lovely meal here*.

The other thing to remember is that there isn’t just one customer for each business. It’s important to generate a collective of customers to bear in mind so you know who you’re speaking to and how to do that.

But HOOOOW?

So this is hopefully where this toolkit comes in, it’s easy enough to say ‘you mix ingredients’ but the toolkit should give you a step by step guide to doing so. Where to find the ingredients and what to look for… (Have I taken this metaphor too far now?) Essentially, it should help you find the attributes of your customers, narrow down the important bits and then figure out how to apply them in a way that makes sense.

How the toolkit helps

The toolkit took us days to write, it’s a really in-depth guide to help you figure out who your audience is whether you’re an existing business or just starting out. It’s designed to help you manage the different elements of your business to really see your customers as a collective of individuals so that you can then communicate with them effectively.

It includes 4 steps, 3 templates (that you reprint for each customer) a number of tasks and a whole lot of prompts and examples as well as lots of chat and information from our brains that we’ve spent a while working on to make sure it’s simple to understand and follow through.

We hope that by the end of the toolkit you have clarity on who your customers are so that you can tailor your marketing messages to them and have them in mind when making decisions and communicating with them.

If you’d like more information about the toolkit there’s loads more on the listing…

Thanks for reading pals!

I really hope that this toolkit helps you – we’ve had such incredibly lovely feedback from the first two – THANK YOU! – so are hoping that this one is just as useful. If you have any feedback or would like to suggest topics for future toolkits please do get in touch!

Hopefully see you next week, I’m crossing fingers and toes I’ll be organised (for once) for the show and won’t be running around like a headless chicken!

Take Care,

L x