Know Your Audience? But How? Marketing Planning for Small Businesses

I remember when I first started marketing for small businesses. “Know your audience” people told me. 

Ok… but how? 

Sure, I can make up an audience of people I think will be interested in a product… but that’s really just guessing. How do I actually know what they want, what they feel, what they think, what questions they have, and what problems they face? 

Not guess. Not assume. Not surmise. Know. 

And this is especially true for new businesses. 

If you’ve got a customer base already and you’ve been in business for a while, you probably know your audience pretty well. 

But what if you’re just starting? How do you know if an audience even exists? How do you know if the audience you think is yours really is yours? 

The Most Important Part Of Knowing Your Audience

There’s a thing called the Conversion Heuristic. You should absolutely read the entire article if you’re in business or marketing, but the first two parts of it are the most important here. 

Essentially, it says the two most dominant factors that determine whether or not you’ll get a sale are 1. The motivations of your prospect and 2. The strength of your value proposition in relation to that motivation. 

You can change your value proposition, but you cannot change someone’s motivation.

A prospect’s motivation: what they want, their pain, their desires, their dreams, their hopes, and their future, and how your business plays into that, are what you need to understand.

Once you understand what motivates your prospects, you can align your value proposition and promise to fulfill whatever that motivation is.

How Do You Find A Prospect’s Motivation?

 There are three ways.

Ask them. 

If you already have clients, or some relationship with your target audience, go ask them. Ask them if what you offer would help. Ask them what they think the selling points are. Ask them why they wouldn’t buy it. 

Ask them to give you honest answers. 

People, especially people we know, have a tendency to want to save our feelings. They want to encourage us. They want to believe we have good ideas and support us.

Don’t let them do that. 

Ask for the brutal honest truth. 

Remind them that if you go into this with bad information, you’re likely to lose a significant quantity of time and money. They can save you from potentially massive losses, if they just refuse to spare your feelings right now. 

The internet

If there’s one place on Earth where no one cares about your feelings, it’s the internet. 

www.quora.com is a good place to go and see who’s asking questions and how people are answering. Based on the questions, their popularity, and the answers people most liked, you can start to get a good idea of what people want to know, what their pain points are, and what experts are saying. 

www.answerthepublic.com is an engine that compiles the questions people are asking Google. Type in your topic, and you’ll see what people want to know. 

You’ll have to deduce the motivations behind both of these, but with a little trial and error, you can get pretty close.

The last two were free, this one has a nominal cost.

www.pollfish.com is a paid polling service. You pick your target audience, set up qualifying questions (“are you a business owner?” is a good one), and ask them about whatever you need to know. Likert scales, open ended, multiple choice… Whatever you need. Just make sure that you have some plan of action with each question. 

Which means, if people answer one of your questions in a certain way, you should know what you’re going to do with that answer. 

Don’t just ask, plan what you’re going to ask. Plan what you’re going to do with the information once you have it.

Once you know what motivates your prospects, you can plan your products, offers, sales, discounts, promotions, and marketing around offering them the solutions to whatever it is they need.

Know your audience = know their motivations. 

If you want someone to give your marketing campaigns an audit and tell you what’s working, what’s not, and what you should do next, get in touch. We offer paid audits that provide simple answers and clear solutions.