How Do I Pick An Audience To Focus On?

An audience focus that’s too broad means you’ll never be special to anyone.

It seems obvious, right? But the wrong answer to “Who’s your target audience?” can waste a bunch of time and resources. And I hate that.

When I ask marketing, comms and editorial leaders about their target audience, what I’m trying to get to is:

• For your most consequential growth opportunity, how are purchase decisions made, and who makes them?
• How do we make a case for focusing on those purchasers, and not everyone, everywhere?

When you start to build a content strategy, there’s an impulse to try to reach a broad group. That’s a trap.

Here’s how to get to a specific target audience:

• Get clarity from leadership. Your team needs a clear view of the business’s strategy: What are the growth opportunities your company is betting on? What’s key to growth in the next 3-5?
• Audit your current situation for bright spots. Who’s already engaging with your content, website, sales team? What audiences are already converting in the areas where your company is betting?
• Research buying dynamics. Interview your sales team to understand buying titles, motivations and buying dynamics (Who makes the decision? What pressure are they under? Who pays?).
• Evaluate business impact, NOT audience size. A big audience can be a false flag, so avoid the pull of expansion unless it really makes sense for your business. With input from your strategy, current situation and sales team, start to describe your audience specifically, using industry, title, and/or company size: “Our target audience is [CXOs] in [Industry] working at companies with more than [$] in revenue.”
• Stick to your audience line. The way you justify your work in marketing is by being fully aligned with sales. Marketing teams get more scrutiny when their work starts to sprawl.

Good audience focus makes your marketing so much easier. Your content works harder when you can make one audience feel like it was made just for them.

(Note, this approach works for publishers, too: Picking a more niche audience and owning that audience is better for attracting sponsors and members than a sprawling consumer-based content strategy).

KRYSTLE KOPACZ CEO, Revmade krystle@revmade.com

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PS. This is part 1 in a 3-part series that unlocks a simple content value framework. Next week: How to figure out your target audience’s biggest problems.