When you look at advertisements of brands like Nike and Netflix, have you noticed some peculiar differences? Like the tone, language, people who are featured in the ads, and even the style of advertising. Everything seems to be focused on different demographics of people that help to create a unique personality of each of these brands. Lets talk about Intended Audience
Venturing into anything whether business, content, or even marketing, requires one common factor- defining your audience. Without defining your intended audience you are just shooting arrows in the dark.
In this article, we will talk about:
Meaning of intended audience.
Intended audience in writing
Three different types of the intended audience
How can you make your copy more relevant?
Meaning of intended audience
In simple words, the intended audience is the set of people that your business or your content intends to interact with. It is an encompassed profile of the audience that your brand or copy would like to specifically target.
For example, think about this:
Suppose you are a business selling formal clothes and shoes. You regularly invest in running ads on social media, websites, and writing blogs. But, what if these ads or blogs also show up for people who don’t wear formal clothes or who are not at all related to the corporate world? What would that mean?
It would simply mean a waste of your resources since this group of people are less likely to buy your product. On the contrary, for optimizing your resources, rather than focusing on everybody, it is ideal to give your undivided attention to the relevant set of people.
Simply getting attention will not guarantee your brand success, you need to garner the right kind of attention from the right kind of people. This is the reason why it is important to identify your intended customers for more cost-efficiency and resourcefulness.
Intended audience in writing
When we consider a piece of content or copy, the overall tone and language of the piece create a huge impact. It would be very difficult to deliver your message across if you do not define your target.
For instance, If you are writing a message for children, using complex vocabulary and a serious tone will probably not help you deliver your message successfully. But, using the same for academics might be appropriate.
Good audience research and creating potential audience personas or profiles will also help you place relevant keywords in your copy for better engagement and reach.
Here’s how we can find our intended audience.
Find customer problems
Looking for customers with similar problems that your content can help solve is one of the first steps in identifying your target users. This helps you reach out to people who have a strong reason to read your copy and interact with it. For example, If you are a skincare brand, you can target people who are specifically searching for skincare solutions or talking about skin-related issues on various digital platforms.
Research your competitors
Inspiration is a valuable asset in the marketing domain. Invest time to identify your competitors and then identify the kind of audience that they target. Nowadays, with various social listening software, it becomes easier to compare and analyze the various strategies that your competitors tend to use for their copies.
Researching your audience
One of the most important steps would be to conduct thorough research of your target audience. This means understanding every aspect of their demographics like occupation, age, interests, goals, and location. After which, it will get easier for you to formulate tactics and strategies to incorporate in your copies and messages.
For example, using local slang or local vocabulary in your content.
Create a persona
How can you speak to your consumers without ever knowing them? Creating a persona or a prototype of your ideal consumers helps to solve this problem. Once you design profiles of the ideals customers, you will know their language, values, principles, income, education, and status.
This will help to look for answers for questions like:
How will a customer react to a certain tone in a copy?
How much information should you provide them with?
What are the topics that might interest them?
Three different types of Intended audiences
There can be a lot of segregations and groups but overall the intended audiences are divided into three main sections: Managerial, Experts, and Lay.
Managerial
The managerial audience type is more focused on content that will help them in the decision-making process. Graphs, data, and statistics are important tools to use here.
Lay
This set of the audience has no prior knowledge about the topic that you are discussing. This means that you have to emphasize and elaborate on terms and concepts more to explain in a better manner.
Experts
Also termed as a demanding set, the experts require maximum efforts. They expect elaborative visuals, graphs, and information. For experts, the vocabulary used is generally more on the technical terms and is more advanced.
How can you make your copy more relevant?
Clear headlines
It is common for a user to first glance through your headlines before they make a decision to actually read your content. This is enough to prove how important headlines are in a copy. Your headlines should always be brief, clear, and attractive for your users. On the other hand, using misleading headlines can hurt your conversion and engagement rate.
Using keywords
Once you understand your audience, using relevant keywords will help you reach them faster. Investing in keyword research is vital for an effective and engaging copy.
Your copy and headlines need to be SEO-friendly and with targetted keywords, otherwise, they might never reach your target audiences.
Get feedback
Regular feedback will help you grow and make your copy more relevant. Look for ways to gather constructive feedback from your consumers. This will help you understand their problems and improve your content immensely. It is also an excellent way to create more engagement opportunities between you and
