How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

While many of us feel we know and understand our audience, do we really? Understanding your audience is the cornerstone of all our marketing efforts. That’s right, all of it! It isn’t the product or service you provide. You can always tweak that. You can’t though (at least not very easily) tweak your audience.

So while most businesses really think they know their audience and have a target audience, but are they really? Do these businesses have the data to back up the assumptions? Data can quickly turn opinions into facts. Remember, more than likely you are NOT your audience and what your CEO and top executives likes maybe not what your customer wants.

Yes, this can be very hard for a business to do – to remove their own preferences from their methodologies. For example, you may work in the music industry and think no one is on MySpace and everyone is on Facebook so you will automatically put all your marketing efforts onto Facebook. Did you know though that 14.2 million artists are on MySpace and 53 million songs are in the MySpace library with 13,000 new ones being uploaded to the often overlooked social network daily? If that executive knew that data, they probably would change their priorities.

The only way to really find out what you can about your audience is to search out analytics and statistics wherever you may find them. Twitter and Facebook offer great free tools but if you don’t have an audience following yet on your own social media profiles and website traffic, then you can find out some of this information by analyzing the accounts of others who serve your perceived same audience, even competitors. Google Analytics and their other free tools can offer a slew of great information that you can spend days looking at and analyzing.

Your audience is your customers. Your customers are who pay your bills! By understanding and getting to know these people by utilizing various tools is the single most important thing you can do in your marketing efforts.

For more information on learning whom your audience really is and then how to best market to them contact Big Couch Media Group today at 561-733-1200 or visit BigCouchMedia.com.