Tips to Help You Better Understand Your Audience
A good product will find a market and generate sales, but if you don’t know who is buying you risk missing out on consistent sales opportunities for your brand and getting bypassed by the competition.
Having a refined brand strategy focused on understanding and connecting with your target audience – their interests, lifestyles and how and when they respond to marketing tactics – will make you stand out and generate the long-term lift in leads you are seeking.
At Gavin, we can help your organization develop a comprehensive brand strategy and marketing messages that will reach your target audiences and help you achieve your organizational goals.
Read on to learn more about our approach and how we can help you take your brand to the next level.
Tapping Into Emotions
It may sound simple to say, but the most important element in effective brand strategy is understanding your audience.
To better connect with those groups and get the result you are looking for, you need to go beyond the demographics and look at the psychographics for your potential clients.
Building a complete buyer persona will make for a more effective marketing strategy. To do this, you need to combine relevant demographics such as age, education and income level, with psychographics including attitudes, aspirations, wants and needs. This will help you determine what makes your target audience buy and how they may respond to your content.
Tapping into your target audience’s emotions and values through your marketing is paramount to early success and can build brand loyalty.
One way to relate to your audience is to put yourself in their shoes and start with a visual exercise that can help guide brand strategy discussions with your marketing team.
Find a collection of clippings – a mix of keywords, phrases, pictures, colors, symbols and other graphics – and look to find something that relates to your audience. This is a great starting point to help the design team understand your impressions of your audience.
We understand that everyone on your leadership team will have a different perspective on what resonates with your brand, but there will be similarities that emerge.
Holberg Design, which Gavin acquired in 2019, used this process during creative brand building meetings with Wyndridge Farm. Inspiration images helped to inspire the logo design and set the tone for the overall brand strategy.
Don’t Work in Silos
While your audience often connects first with a visual, developing a brand strategy that will relate and then stick with your target audience takes a team approach.
As designers work with you on concepts for new brand visuals, it is critical that there is also collaboration between the public relations and digital marketing teams to ensure a consistent brand message for you and your core audience.
We believe a cohesive and coordinated approach between these departments and you delivers a smoother process for the brand and helps drive sales growth. Without it, you risk experiencing brand dissolve and getting lapped by your competition.
Be Consistent
As your organization eyes expansion into new markets and your team grows, having a brand standards guide will serve as a vital component to keep your team on the same page in terms of visuals and messaging.
But keep in mind, what worked well in your existing footprint may not relate to audiences in other markets. If you plan to expand your brand into new regions, conduct focus groups to ensure your existing message and overall brand strategy resonates with the new audience.
The market is always evolving and the needs and desires of your target audience are frequently shifting, along with your competition’s tactics. What are you doing to enhance the customer experience with your brand to boost your sales?
Want to get ahead of your competition and better connect with your audience through relevant targeting? We can help. Our team of experienced brand strategists can help you hone in on what your target audiences will respond to and take your business to the next level. Let’s talk.