Step 14: Map Your Audience

Your audience is central to your strategy – understanding how they think, buy, live, shop, and even how they use the Internet is key to how you design a brand and products that find relevance.

When you’re working out your audience, here are a few things to consider:

• Who buys your products and services? (break it down by age, sex, income, geography, career, motivations, goals, habits to their career to their preferred communication channels, media they consumer, technology they use, etc)

• What specific problems are your customers trying to solve when they turn to your business/products/brand?

• Why and how do customers find and choose brands like your own? · What factors are most important to the buying decision?

• Why would customers choose to do business with your brand/business rather than your competitors?

• What do customers and others experience when they interact with your company on a day-to-day basis?

• How do you make people feel?

• How would your customers describe you?

Once you’ve described your audience, you’ll be able to map the right content and target them accordingly.

Ultimately, your brand ambition will be ensure that whatever content and messages your brand delivers speaks to them personally, contextually and culturally about the right solutions for them.

They should think that your brand has the best answers that they need and seek.

It’s this contextual relevance that will lead to them following your content and trialing your products/services/offering.

Similarly, map your fans. These are people who may not necessarily buy your product or service but follow you and/or know about you and are likely to recommend you to others.

Use the same audience mapping exercise questions to discover who they are and how they want to be targeted.

Use the resultant information to guide any/all content planning, social media posts, etc. with a view to get them to positively talk about your brand.