4.1 What questions must I ask about audiences? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->So we've looked at a number of metrics so far,</v> now we're gonna shift gears and talk about your audience, who are the people that you're trying to reach? So, you have your total addressable market, so that's all of the potential people that you could reach as an audience. Within that, you have a target market, these are the people that you're actually trying to reach, you're making an effort to reach this group of people, this subset of people in the total group that you could reach. And within that, you can have segments. So within your target market, you can actually divide groups of people up more granularly. And by doing so, you might have different marketing messages to reach them, you might have different tactics that reach them. And so, the way that you're using audience characteristics is both to create your overall target market, but also to segment within that market. So how do we do that? Well, really simple way is to think like a reporter. So ask yourself, who's contacting us? What are they contacting us about? Why, when, where, how are they contacting us? And so, this gives you an ability to brainstorm, to ask yourself a lot of questions. Now, don't just sit with your opinions as the answers, what you wanna do is to get hold of data that answers these questions. What data do you have that will give you objective answers to these questions so that you can know who your audience is. Now, this isn't definitive, this isn't the only set of questions you can ask, but what we want you to do is to think about these questions so that you can be as comprehensive as possible so that you don't leave anything out. So you cannot only look for data for these questions, but you can also talk to people and try and get their ideas of what the answers are to the questions. Maybe talk to your sales team and see what they think the answers to these questions are. So some of this can be opinion, but the most important way to answer these questions is with data. Now, every question that you ask can unlock an answer, and that answer is of a certain type. So if you ask a who question, the answer is gonna be about a kind of person. If you ask a when question, your answer is going to be time, A what question is a need, where is a place and so on. Now, just because the answer to a when question is time, doesn't mean that it has to fit some specific format. For some businesses, when your customers contact you might be seasonal, it might be a time of year, or it might be the end of the year when they're trying to use up budget. But for some businesses, the answer to a when question might be a time of day, maybe you sell to small businesses, and they contact you at night, after they've closed up the shop, after they've sent the kids to bed, and this is the first time that they've had a chance to start researching that problem that they had in the shop today. And so, don't think about this as constraining, don't think about it as something that has to fit some kind of certain pattern, use it as brainstorming, use it to kind of jog your memory, use it to kind of think expansively. What we're looking for you to do is to be as broad as possible in your understanding of your audience, and to look for as much data as you can to answer these questions. Now there's interesting points at the intersection of this model. And so at each intersection between a question, you can have a different kind of answer. So for example, the combination of why and what of motivation and need can be a purpose. The combination of when and what a time and a need can be a plan, where and when could be an event. And again, think expansively. So event could mean an event in your audience's life, or it could be an event that they go to, either of those things are okay. So if the questions in the middle didn't feel like they got after everything you really wanna think about, start looking at the intersections between those questions and see what those answers might yield. And again, whenever possible, you wanna use data to answer the questions. Now, when you look at these, one of the things you might see is that we had some of these questions colored in blue and others in orange. Well, the blue ones are actually more permanent, they're more fixed, they change a lot more slowly about your customer than the orange ones, the orange ones are more transient, more ephemeral, more fluid. So the orange ones are things that might be changed from day to day or week to week. and they're more circumstantial, whereas the blue ones are things that are fairly intrinsic about your customer, about your audience, and they take longer to change. Not that they never change, but they might change slowly over years. Now we tend to call those fixed characteristics a persona, where the orange characteristics are the buyer journey. And so this is really what you wanna be thinking about is, how can you think about things that are about your customer that don't change all that much, as opposed to things that are a bit more ephemeral, they might have to do with just the way that they're approaching a particular decision in this moment of time? So we've looked at buyer journeys already. And remember, what is your customer thinking at each step? And what do you know about your customers? These are those more transient characteristics of how your audience contacts you. But the more fixed characteristics are personas. Personas help us target the right buyers. This is an example of a persona from one of my clients, a software company who is selling their software to technical people, to software developers. So, this persona is an early adopter, understands technology but not business, is unafraid to be different but cares about what other techies think, decide slowly and persuaded by detailed facts. So as you think about this persona, you can already start to think about different types of marketing approaches that might work versus might not work. For example, this might not be a person who spends a lot of time on Twitter. On the other hand, they might really be interested in a long form asset like a white paper, but probably not a case study because they're not business oriented. But when we say that they care what other techies think, maybe they would be interested in a testimonial but not from a business person, from a technologist who really understands how the technology works. And so, all of these things can go into you thinking through what your marketing approach will be. So the more you can understand about this persona, the better off you're going to be. Now, the biggest problem that I see with personas is that companies try to have too many of them. They have a persona mania where they might have 10, 15, even 20 different personas. Well, you know what the problem is with that? If you've got 20 different personas, you might as well have none, because you're not actually going to craft marketing messages for 20 different personas. I'd say start with two or three or maybe four, but limit it to the number of personas that you'll actually create distinct marketing messages for, that's what the real value of personas are. So it's important to have personas, but it's not important to have 20 different personas, just so you can tell everyone that you got lots of personas. What's really important is for you to have the right amount so that you'll create marketing messages for each persona, that's the level of depth that you need to understand your audience. So what kind of characteristics can go into your audience model? So as you're thinking about what you wanna know about audiences, we can go beyond those reporter questions, and we can talk about several different types of metrics, several different types of data that you can use to understand your audience better. Now, because I'm a consultant, I have to have a clever name for the model, so we call it the A2G model because each different type of characteristics starts with a letter A2G. So let's dive in and see what we've got. So A is for attitudes. So this is about what they think. Sometimes you'll hear these called aspirations or psychographics, but it's really about what your customer thinks or feels or believes. You can think about it as describing your audience's personality, values, interests, purpose, any of these things are different words to say, these are the kinds of things we wanna understand, what makes your audience tick? Now, sometimes B2B companies, especially think that this isn't terribly important, they think this is kind of a B2C thing, that's not right. So for example, in B2B, suppose you have a new product, it's something very new, it hasn't been done before, it's a breakthrough in the industry, you really care about the attitude of the audience. Why? Because you want an audience that's open to new things, you don't want an audience that will only do something when everyone else has already started using it. And so understanding attitudes about your audience is just as important as B2B as it is in B2C. Now, where do you get this kind of data? Well, you can get it in surveys or from social listening software, or you might have communities that you're part of, any of these places or places you can mine attitudinal data. Behaviors, what did they do? Well, did they use certain search keywords? When did they come to your website? What are other websites they may have gone to in the past? You might be able to get that from a cookie aggregator. You might know their search keywords from Google Search Console. What kind of behavior did they have in the session when they came to the site? So what pages do they look at, that might come from your web analytics system. And, it could be your financial systems, your CRM system, might know what their purchase history is, might know their customer lifetime value. And so, this is really about understanding what they're trying to do and what they've done in the past. C is for completion. So, some people would say, C is for conversion, and that's true. Any of your conversions is a type of task completion, but I think there are more tasks completions than that, there might be other things that you care about them completing, for example, paying a bill, or checking the usage of the software that you've sold them, or making progress to a purchase. If you remember, when we were looking at the buyer journey, we often tried to know whether they went from step to step. So any of these things could be considered task completions. Obviously, your web analytics system is the main source of this data, but if it's a task they're completing offline, for example, if you sell offline, a CRM system might be a place to go. You also might find information about this in your marketing automation system. How about demographics? Demographics are things we're all familiar with, because anybody who's ever bought advertising knows that that's the main way you purchase advertising is according to demographics. So age, gender income. Some people are increasingly looking at device or operating systems such as iOS or Android as being something that they think of as almost a demographic, some people think it can be a surrogate for whether people have higher or lower incomes. But if you're a B2B company, you wanna go deeper than that, you wanna understand if possible, what their title is in the company, their job role, whether they have purchasing authority, whether they're in management. There may be a whole bunch of other things that B2B companies consider part of demographics. And where do you get this information? Well, again, it could be in your web analytics and CRM system, they often have ways of showing you demographics. But cookie aggregators can tell you what kind of content people looked at on other sites, and you might be able to see that when they come to your site, and visit our identification systems for B2B, especially, can tell you what company people are coming from and what industry they're coming from. Now understand that only works if they're in an office location. With so many people working from home nowadays, visitor identification doesn't work as well as it used to. E is for entry. So where did they come from? So did they click on a search result? Did they type in your URL or follow a bookmark? Did they click a link on another website or a blog or a social network? Did they click on an email link or an ad? All of these things are ways of telling how interested they might be and how engaged they might be. Because we know that people who come from search or follow a bookmark might be more interested in your company than someone who just clicked on an ad. And so, understanding that might help you understand their intent or their motivation. And it's your web analytics system that helps you do this. Firmographics for B2B. So, the company that they're coming from, you wanna know their industry, their location, their company size, maybe you wanna know whether they're a non-profit, perhaps you care if they're a conglomerate, because you might wanna think about whether you're dealing with the parent company or with a subsidiary. One that I think is often overlooked is the performance of the company. I know as a consultant, I often have better success targeting companies that are number two or three or four in their industry, rather than the number one, because they're more likely to think they need a consultant, because they're trying to scale that hill and become number one. Sometimes the number one companies thinks they have it all figured out. And so, depending on your business, you might care about the performance of the company, but any of these other things could be useful for you too in targeting the marketing message. Now the same suspects can deliver this type of data, visitor identification system, cookie aggregators, web analytics and your CRM system, all might have some of this data to help you know more about your customer. The last one is maybe the easiest one, G is for geographics. Where are they coming from? Now, this one could be really useful because you might have different product mixes in different regions, you might also have different types of differentiation against different competitors. And so again, visitor identification system, web analytics, CRM system, any of these could be sources of your geographic information about your audience, and that's a quick way of being able to sum up all of the characteristics for your audiences using that A2G model.