Thinking outside of the box to find your target market

The key to effective communication is to ensure your message reaches your desired audience of influence. But if you’re not reaching that audience it is a waste of resources.

And it isn’t uncommon. At contentgroup, we often hear from our clients they’re having difficulty finding their target market or, once they find them, they’re hard to engage and even out of reach.

Reviewing your communication channels

The first step is to review your current communication channels; how effective are they? Digital channels like websites have tools available to monitor visitors and their actions. For example, some websites track the visitor’s IP address, indicating the geographical location. Other tools track the time visitors spend on pages or how they got there.

Social media on the other hand can be fine-tuned to directly target your audience. Organically Facebook tracks various geographical locations and age groups. This facilitates content creation that caters directly to your audience. And through paid advertisements, you can also frame your posts to be seen by individuals with key interests typical of your audience.

Review your analytics and results, do they match your expectations? If not, it’s time to think outside the box as your audience is likely offline.

Finding your ‘lost’ audience

The key tool you have at your disposal to accomplish this is empathy. The following questions are fundamental to finding and capturing the attention of your target market.

What does your audience do on a typical day?

How do they receive their information?

Who are they influenced by?

Where do they spend their time?

Why should they care about your message?

Dedicate time to researching the answers to these questions and it will create a detailed persona of your audience.

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Connect with the audience’s environment

This feeds into the next step; discover channels that align with the environment your target market resides within. And remember, content is far more than blogs and tweets. It goes offline.

If your audiences’ is built of middle-aged commuters in the outer suburbs, talkback radio is a vital channel to reach them. So are other traditional outlets like local business magazines or free papers.

Think about your audiences’ days online and offline, then find a way there.

There is a range of channel options at your disposal, many of which are low cost. Opinion pieces and earned media from interviews or media releases are low-cost ways to get into traditional media outlets.

If your organisation is linked to government and the topic is nonpartisan or designed to protect the community from nefarious activities like scams, use that. Engaging third parties such as Federal and State MPs is a great way to connect with older Australians and migrant communities. Pamphlets and other traditional mediums can be given to MPs for their stalls at community events or their electorate office.

These are just a few ideas to initiate a broad-spectrum approach to content communication. The possibilities and opportunities are endless. So, if you can’t find your audience taking these initial steps and thinking outside the box can yield pure gold.