3 reasons your marketing campaign needs a defined target audience

It gives your strategy a clear direction

Knowing your target audience is what allows you to determine where to focus your marketing efforts for better results. And it’ll enable you and your team to choose the suitable channels for spreading the message far and wide.

A good example of this is our recent campaign with Network Rail and Mattel to launch a special episode of Thomas & Friends™ to help teach young people about rail safety. While it appeared that young children were the main audience for this campaign, we identified that parents of young children were in fact our primary target audience and the ones we needed to consider when it came to channel selection. This understanding enabled us to advise on the best direction to take with influencer partnerships, identifying a selection of influencers being followed by predominantly parents of younger children. This approach made the best use of the client’s available budget and delivered fantastic results, with a 5% influencer engagement rate from the target audience – vs an industry average of 1.67%.

It defines what content you should create

The key to creating really great content starts with knowing exactly who it’s for. Without this knowledge, you may well end up aiming your marketing efforts towards the wrong people entirely.

For instance, if you’ve decided to create TikTok videos for your campaign as you’ve heard that’s a great way to spread the message far and wide, but your target audience is in fact time-poor working professionals aged 35+, your message will only be reaching the wrong people and you’ll have wasted a tonne of time and resources. It’s a much better and more cost-effective approach to determine who it is you’re trying to reach first before diving headfirst into content creation.

It tells you what language to use

To resonate with your audience, you need to be able to speak with them directly by using their language. This is what forms relationships with your audience and ultimately creates loyalty among those who feel your organisation really “gets them”.

This is exactly what we did for Samaritans and Network Rail when we worked alongside them to launch a national behaviour-change campaign to help save lives around the railway. It was only by developing a deep understanding of our target audience – rail passengers who didn’t feel confident knowing how to act if they saw someone in distress around the railway – that we were able to develop a concept and messaging that would resonate with them. Check out the full case study here.

As I’m sure you’ll now agree, having a clearly defined target audience is the key to making the most out of your marketing budget and getting the best return on investment. If you need support with identifying your target audience for an upcoming campaign, get in touch with us and we’ll help you get started.