How To: Target Your Audience More Effectively

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Are you hitting YOUR target?

Audience targeting is crucial. That’s the best way to describe it. Let me illustrate the point. Imagine you are just finished a long day at work. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. You feel the headache coming on.

Then you remember that you have to rush across town to pick up your kids before 4:30pm (or else you have to pay the school an extra fee for the month. No thanks.) You pick up the kids and realize that you haven’t gone shopping for groceries and you have a small army to feed. By now the headache is a full on jackhammer pounding away at your cranium.

You pull up at the grocery store and head straight to the isle with all of the magical medicine pills. Imagine you see all of the medicine displayed there before you. You see the Tylenol, Bayer, Advil and Excedrin.

Then you look and you see a large red jar labeled “medicine.” Now let me ask you, what are the chances of you picking up the bottle labeled “medicine?” Slim chance, right? While it’s probably true that the “medicine” can cure your pain, the fact is that its lack of targeting leaves it gathering dust on the shelf.

The same goes for audience targeting online. (and offline for that matter)

If you don’t target your audience properly, you are no different than a company trying to remedy your prospects headache with your red jar of “medicine.” Now, your “medicine” might just work out but they are much more likely to reach for some something that is more targeted to relieve their exact pain.

Correct targeting is THAT important.

Reading Minds

In order to target your audience correctly, you have to understand a few things about human psychology. Human beings are motivated to take action based primarily on emotional triggers. People may tell you that they make rational decisions but this just isn’t the truth. For every product or service there is a primary emotional trigger that motivates people to take action. It is your job to find that trigger for your particular product or service.

Understand that there are two primary ways that peole are motivated to take an action. They are motivated to:

move toward pleasure
move away from pain

The motivation to move away from pain is twice as strong as the motivation to move toward pleasure. For example, a product that claims to “add more money to your account in 30 days” might not do as good as a product that claims it will take you from “broke to rich in 30 days.” (although both are probably scams…)

Specify, Specify, Specify

Narrow your niche! This one sentence alone will do wonders for your biz. (seriously) People feel like if they generalize in their business it makes them able to appeal to a broader range of potential clients. But what you really do is allow yourself to get lost amongst a vast sea of competition.

Don’t be a big red jar of “medicine!” Think about the type of client that your product or service helps out. What does that client look like? How old are they? What are their concerns? What pain are they experiencing? What are their fears and frustrations? What are their wants and aspirations? Do they have any common experiences? How does your product or service help eliminate their pain? What types of questions are they asking?

Have some compassion and put yourself in their shoes. Seek to understand them first and foremost.

Then ask yourself how you can position what you offer to best serve this “ideal customer.”

Now ask yourself, “can I focus in on a narrower range of clients?” Instead of being a “foot doctor,” can I focus on being a “foot doctor specializing in treating Veterans in CA?” Instead of focusing on “adolescent counseling,” can I focus on “counseling for physically abused children under the age of twelve?” Do you see the difference? Are you starting to see how powerful it can be to target your customers more effectively?

The Point

Better targeting leads to more conversions. Period. If you target your niche and set yourself up as someone who takes away the pain of your clients, you will make sales. Your website will convert better. You will generate more leads.

Proper targeting makes the rest of the conversion process much easier. (but not necessarily easy) When done right it ensures that the right person is in the right place to find a solution to a problem that they are having right now. If that place is your website or landing page, what could be better than that?

How about you? Are you targeting YOUR audience effectively? Share your top tips for audience targeting in the comments.

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