THATBlog

Your target audience is the one most likely to have an interest in your brand. This is the group most likely to engage your site, share your content, and buy your product or service. Reaching 10,000 people in your target audience will develop more sales than reaching 20,000. Do you know how to reach your target audience? These are the ways to reach your target market that are most important:

Create Content

Your target audience self-selects. You just need to be sure that when they do, they encounter your marketing or website. They'll regularly search for products and services of the type you provide. The key is to ensure that your brand and website actually comes up in these searches.

This means creating content to take advantage of SEO. Content means blogs, articles, white papers, eBooks, videos, apps, games, and anything else that might cause Google to show your site high up in its search results. To do so, that content involves keywords that your target audience is most likely to use in a search.

The content should speak to their interests but shouldn't always directly sell. Your target market is generally asking questions in an online search, so they don't want products – they want answers. Provide these answers and they'll trust and look to your brand for additional answers. This is how they learn to trust your brand.

Social Media

Utilize social media. Inbound marketing through content creation relies on search engine hits, but you can boost the chances of content going viral by sharing it on social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

All it takes is the right page or profile to share your content, and suddenly you'll find it drawing in a number of new visitors. If something doesn't get shared widely on social media, don't consider it a failure.

Social media is not the core of an inbound marketing strategy. Consider anything that happens there as a bonus. Don't get emotionally wrapped up in whether a post does well there or not. Don't invest a ton in boosting posts on social media unless you have a very specific strategy in place. 

Facebook can sometimes be as likely to share your content with a range of fake profiles as they are real ones. They may even click on the content and engage the website, but this doesn't mean those profiles will ever buy anything – and it screws up your analytics if you begin thinking about the site's failure to engage instead of recognizing that visitors are coming from a click farm.

Use social media. Don't get wrapped up in it until specific platforms prove themselves to you.

Respond to Comments

Engagement goes both ways. There are many ways to reach your target audience, but once it's arrived your job isn't done. Respond to comments. You don't have to write the next great novel; just acknowledge people. A simple, “Thanks!” in response to a compliment can go a long way in making that commenter feel heard. That makes them much more likely to continue engaging with your brand in the future.

Avoid doing this constantly – it can be very easy to lose time responding to comments and wonder where the day went. Remember that social media is designed to be addictive. Block out time for responses just like any other task.

Provide High-Quality Gated Content

All your content should meet a standard and maintain a consistent voice. This enables visitors to feel comfortable trusting your brand and the information you convey. Blogs, articles, and videos may be provided for free. This helps visitors feel they're already getting great value from you at no cost. That helps them perceive your entire brand as having exceptional value.

It is often wise to gate longer content. This may include white papers, eBooks, and webinars. Visitors will simply be asked to fill out a form with some information in order to access the longer content. This form should ask for name, email, title, and organization. It may also ask why the visitor is interested in accessing the content. Provide a drop-down menu with checkboxes or a blank text field they can briefly fill in.

That's it. The more information you ask for and the longer the form takes, the more likely visitors are to back out of it. If they feel they're being asked for information that they feel uncomfortable providing, they'll lose trust in you and may not ever return. Limit the information you ask for to only what you need.

Segment Your Target Audience

Utilize information like the keywords they searched for, the direction of the content they accessed, or the reason they gave in forms to access the content. This can help you segment email lists to be more specific. Instead of sharing broad-based content that may not speak to their specific interest in your brand, this allows you to pinpoint much more specific content that they're more likely to engage.

Once you've partitioned your email marketing lists by more precise interests, you can automate specific new content sent to each list on a regular basis. Don't overdo it or you'll seem desperate. Don't share every new piece of content under the sun. Choose content that engages each group's interest and share this.

Outside Confirmation

Your target audience has a range of choices to select from. You're likely not the only brand in your industry that they know or are even considering. They'll eventually choose a brand, and that will be based on price, perceived quality, and trust. Price is pretty straightforward, but quality and trust are more difficult for them to verify.

One of the most valuable assets you have is outside confirmation about the quality of your brand, products, and services. Every award and ranking should have its own press release. There should be an obvious section on your website to read and view testimonials. When someone compliments your brand or describes a positive story they had with it online, ask them if you can use their statement as a testimonial.

Take advantage of conferences, and speak at ones that your target audience will value. Then share the video. This gives your visitors outside confirmation because it means the conference and its attendees consider your words and thoughts valuable. They consider your brand a leader in its industry.

Each of these reinforces the idea in your target audience's minds that your brand provides exceptional value, service, and quality. If other people who don't have to trust you, trust you anyway, then your target audience will follow suit.