When it comes to public relations and communications, understanding your target audience is everything. Without a clear idea of who you’re trying to reach, your campaigns are guaranteed to fall on deaf ears. Improper audience targeting leads to wasted time and resources while you endlessly spin your wheels.
Fortunately, great audience targeting will mitigate most of this risk. Finding your ideal target audience ensures you’re speaking to the right people with the right messaging.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to find your target audience for PR and communications. Stick around for bonus tips at the end on how to reach your target audience with precision.
What is a target audience in PR and communications?
A target audience in PR and communications is loosely defined as the people most interested in your messaging. Your messaging could involve a product, service, charity, or other cause.
In short, your target audience is the people you intend to speak to.
Target audiences can be defined in many different ways. However, one of the best ways to define a target audience is to divide the group into different segments. These segments have shared characteristics among 3 primary categories:
- Geographic
- Demographic
- Psychographic
Audience segments, when combined, start to paint a complete picture of the people you are talking to. This allows you to effectively craft your messaging to appeal to their tastes, desires, beliefs, etc.— to “speak their language.”
Geographic segmentation refers to the characteristics that describe where an audience is located. This includes any information defining their place of residence, population density, weather/climate, or the topographic makeup of the land.
Demographics describe the statistical characteristics of a particular audience. These characteristics include age, gender, ethnicity, education, religion, income level, and others.
Psychographic characteristics involve the attitudes and beliefs of a particular audience — personality, values, attitudes, interests, lifestyle, and others.
The result of combining excellent audience segmentation together is an audience profile.
An audience profile describes your “ideal” audience member – if one person has all of the typical characteristics of your audience combined into one.
A good way of looking at it is the audience profile describes a hypothetical individual. In contrast, your target audience describes a group of real-world people with these ideal characteristics in common.
Why you need to know who your target audience is in PR and communications
In PR and communications, having a targeted audience can be the difference between a successful campaign and a complete dud.
Here are the top reasons why it’s important to know who your target audience is:
- It gives your communications focus. Your organization only has so many resources to reach the people that matter the most. Therefore, it’s imperative for PR and communication’s success that you focus your efforts and invest in the areas that have the most impact. Narrowing your focus involves choosing channels, platforms, media contacts, and formats that get the most bang for your buck. A target audience gives you a target to aim at so your overall communication strategy stays laser-focused.
- It allows you to personalize your messaging. A survey of more than 8,000 people worldwide found that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations (Accenture, 2018). These findings speak to the power of using personalized messaging. Using pinpoint audience targeting allows you to include the personalized communication elements that people crave and have come to expect.
- It allows you to measure the impact of your communications. Gathering communications data in the modern world can often feel like a firehose of information. When you have carefully identified and tailored your target audience, this makes it easier to read into statistics and gather valuable insights. You no longer have to sift through endless spreadsheets and dashboards to find what you need. Rather than guesswork, you can assess the performance and gain insight into your target audience by focusing on the statistics that matter.
Now that we know “what” audience targeting is and “why” it is so important, let’s dive into “how” to find your target audience.
How to find your target audience in PR and communications
Here are 4 tried and true methods of finding your target audience.
1. Talk to your customers. One of the first and most obvious ways to find your target audience profile is to talk to your existing customers. The people who have already purchased from your brand were compelled enough by your messaging to purchase. Find out why.
Leverage the data stored in your CRM system to obtain comprehensive insights into previous clients and customers by sending a survey or poll. If you get any really good feedback, give them a call and get some more in-depth information about them.
Once you have a good subsection of customer responses, try to identify any trends in who they are and what they want. Add these commonalities to your audience segmentation, and you are well on your way to finding your target audience.
2. Data analysis. One way to get a bead on your target audience is to look at your website data. Because of modern data tracking, you can get all kinds of in-depth information on who is visiting your website.
Use apps like google analytics to break down your website traffic by geographic, demographic, and psychographic dimensions. Once you have this information, you can make some reasonable inferences about who is most interested in your brand.
3. Competitor analysis. Finding your ideal target audience can be done by analyzing your competitors. Watch them closely to learn the messaging they put into their communications and how their audience responds.
Follow their social media accounts, pay attention to their press releases, subscribe to their newsletters, and do a deep dive into their website content. Doing a competitive SEO analysis on keywords they are ranking for can expose some of your competitors’ communications.
Use media monitoring tools to find out when your competitors have been mentioned and tune in to their conversations.
Once you know your competitor’s audience, you’ll have to decide how much overlap they have with your audience — it all depends on the position of your brand and your overall communications strategy.
Related: 9 Ways Your Competitors are Using Media Monitoring
The main thing is that you are intentional about defining your target audience and tailoring your messaging to their specific interests.
4. Research databases. You can find tons of audience information on research databases. These databases store millions of contacts with in-depth information on their demographic, geographic, and psychographic profiles.
What’s great about these types of prospecting tools/research databases is that you can build a list and reach out to these contacts through phone or email.
LinkedIn Navigator is actually a great list-building tool. You can pull information directly from the social media platform and reach out to people in bulk or individually. If you don’t have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can install linkedin email finder extensions like Clearout to build your own targeted database for reachout.
You can use any or all of the above methods to find your target audience. But combining multiple tactics will generate the best results.
Key considerations for successfully finding your target audience
Finding your target audience is not a one-time task but an ongoing process that evolves over time. With so many dynamic factors changing your communication strategy, you must stay vigilant to redefine and refocus your audience continuously.
Consistent feedback is one of the best ways to manage a fluid target audience. When you put out a communication, say a social media post or a press release, make sure that you follow up and see the reactions that you are getting. How are people responding? Who are they? How should you adjust your target audience to incorporate your new insight?
One of the best ways to gather actionable feedback on your communications is through a media monitoring tool. Media monitoring tools allow you to keep an eye on relevant conversations about your brand, industry, or target audience across multiple media types.
Related: More on leveraging media monitoring for your communications strategy here.
Incorporating consistent feedback into your targeting will help you hone and sculpt a narrowly defined audience over time.
Taking it to the next level: how to reach your target audience effectively
So you’ve built a narrowly defined target audience. Great! Now you have to reach out to them. Here are three tips for making sure that you reach your target audience effectively.
1. Provide relevant and impactful content. When you’re reaching out to your target audience, it’s essential to provide content that is relevant to that audience. To make sure your content hits the mark, start with your target audience in mind and work backward.
Ask yourself, “what is most meaningful to my target audience? What are their hopes and dreams?”
When you speak to your target audience’s emotions rather than logic, you have a far better chance of making an impact on them.
2. Use personalization in your messaging. As we covered above, personalization is a highly effective tactic for reaching your target audience. Personalization can involve anything from names and titles in emails to scheduling your communications based on location and time zone.
Once you’ve gathered all this information about your target audience, use it to supercharge your communications efforts!
3. Use both inbound and outbound channels. Which is better, inbound or outbound channels? While the debate rages on, I encourage you to use both. Let me explain:
While outbound communications channels allow you to reach out directly to a list of contacts, inbound channels allow you to speak to more than the people on your list. The benefit of outbound is the pinpoint accuracy of your communications, while inbound enables you to find audience members that you didn’t know about.
As you can see, both channel types have their strengths and weaknesses. Integrating them into your overall strategy will achieve the best result.
Remember to always tailor your prospecting methods and strategy to your overall communications goals.
Conclusion
Finding your target audience is crucial to your overall communications and PR strategy. If you don’t work to find a highly defined group to speak to, your messaging will remain a proverbial leaf in the wind.
While finding a target audience from scratch can seem challenging, getting the ball rolling in the right direction is very possible. Apply the strategies mentioned in this article, consistently gather feedback, and continually tweak your target audience over time. Eventually, your audience targeting will become a cornerstone of your communications and PR success.
Burrelles’ monitoring and analytics give you the ability to quickly assess trends and extract valuable insights from all media – print, online, broadcast, and social. You can contact us through this form to get more information and discuss your needs.
Guest Contributor: Matt Nawrot is a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing aficionado with a passion for helping others run successful online businesses.
You can connect with him at MattNawrot.com or on LinkedIn.
The copy and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Burrelles, our employees, partners, or affiliates.