Throughout the many blog posts on this website, whenever we discuss the topic of branding or design, we almost always stress the importance of keeping your audience in mind. But how exactly do we create that audience? Today, we’re going to answer just that as we look at the three major steps you should take to build your brand’s audience.

Step One: Targeting

The very first thing you should do when building your audience, as with any project, is to plan it. Look at everything you know about your brand and company, then consider what direction you want to grow in. This step is all about selecting what type of buyer you think will resonate most with your company. Thinking about what niches your goods or services appeal to is a great first step in making this decision. Obviously if your products are generally used by women but are rarely ever purchased by men, your audience is likely going to be a majority female. Maybe your products appeal to people with specific needs, such as gluten free foods or plus sized clothing. In these instances, you don’t want to target an audience that doesn’t resonate with your products, so having these broad groups in mind can help you to target a specific audience more effectively. The easiest way to do this is to look at your actual sales records. Who’s bought my products more than anyone else? Can I see clear trends developing in my customer base early on? The answer is yes, and as you look deeper into it you will be surprised just how clearly your customer base presents itself early on. Use this to formulate your audience goals.

Another extremely efficient technique that can help you pick what your target audience should be is to boil it down to an individual level. Imagine that you’re trying to make just one sale of your product. What type of person do you feel is most likely to buy your product? What type of buyer instills the most confidence in you as a salesperson? There may be one or two characteristics in particular that stick out in your mind, and you should take these and run with them. Start thinking about how these characteristics can apply to an entire market as opposed to an individual, and you’ll start to formulate your ideal target audience in your mind.

Step Two: Attract Your Target

Through thorough planning and sales analysis, we’ve picked out exactly who we want to target with our advertising, branding, and products. Knowing is half the battle, but now it’s time to take action and turn this targeted audience into a larger and larger customer base. This is where good old-fashioned marketing comes into play. We know who our audience is, but how do we get them to come through our doors and make a purchase? Well for starters, we have to go where they are.

Social media is the most important marketing tool at our disposal these days. Everyone has a phone in their pocket, and the population is spending a combined millions of hours on social daily. Tapping into this massive user base is key to bringing our audience to us. Luckily, we already know exactly what type of audience we want to target, so now we have to be savvy and position our advertising exactly where they’re likely to see it. The simplest way is to make posts with the verbiage and tags that are most frequently searched by your audience. Similar to how Search Engine Optimization plays a key role in your website’s traffic, your advertising and social media posts should be optimized for social media searches. This means that, if your business is a pet grooming service and your audience is primarily interested in pets, your social media posts should always contain keywords pertaining to that topic. So your Facebook posts should always include “dog”, “cat”, “pet”, “grooming”, etc. Thinking of keywords in this manner will help your social media posts to get more traffic by ensuring that the people who search and find your posts are indeed the people who would be interested in your business. From your posts, they should easily be able to access your company’s website. In fact, you should almost always include a link in your social media posts to make things as streamlined as possible.

Step Three: Keep Them Coming Back for More

Your specific targeting of your audience is working. You’re bringing in more traffic to your website now that you’ve carefully crafted a marketing campaign that targets exactly who you want it to. But now, we need to keep these customers coming back again and again. Turning curious shoppers into repeat visitors is one of the greatest ways to multiply your revenue as a business, but it can be tricky. There are a few great techniques to keeping customers interested in your company, but our absolute favorite is the usage of a blog.

Blogs are a great tool for your website because of their versatility. A well crafted and maintained blog can simultaneously bring in new traffic and capture the interest of your audience to bring them back to your site every week for more. We’ve mentioned before how blog posts can be a massive benefit to your Search Engine Optimization, as anyone searching for a specific question can be led right to your website for answers. But once that visitor comes by once, your blog posts can continue to work for you. If your site has the answer to one question, then how many more important topics can your blog cover? Your customers come to you because they aren’t experts in your field, but opening the door for them and writing out blog posts can be a great way to invite them into your world. And by creating a blog that feeds them more information on a weekly basis, you can build an audience that always wants to tune in to your site. Building this long-standing relationship with your customers will pay dividends down the line, as they will trust your business more and will truly feel ingrained in your audience. This just makes it all the easier to sell to them, especially if your website allows for them to make purchases remotely. 

Building up an audience is no small task. It takes some serious planning, effective marketing, and a constant effort to keep them interested in your brand. But once you’ve managed to pull it off, you’ll see that all the work was well worth it as your customer base grows larger and larger, never falling off due to disinterest. When you’re trying to chart a course for your business, we implore you to keep these three steps in mind, and always be thinking about how your audience effects your business.