This blog post contains information sourced from Sproutsocial.com, Moz.com, and digitalmarketinginstitute.com.
Choosing your target audience is usually the first step when laying out your marketing plan. But what happens when your target audience includes multiple age groups, socioeconomic backgrounds, and preferences? What if each group chooses to use a different platform? As marketers, these are most likely not an uncommon problem. As today's digital world continues to expand and change, users' preferences have become more diverse than ever. This article will give you everything you need to know on how to optimize your marketing strategy to fit into a variety of audience styles and platforms.
The Importance of Defining a Target Audience
A target audience is the beginning step of any marketing plan, basically a foundation for any marketing campaign. Developing and identifying the target audience has become more complex as the digital age has taken over and evolved into what it is today. Today's target audiences, don't fit into single categories, instead there must be multiple personas made for one target audience in order to encompass a broad enough group. Creating multiple personas that have varying factors like age, location, lifestyle, career, and income can help create that more broad set of audience members.
A persona serves as the representation of your ideal or target customers. Almost all marketers use personas to help them visualize who they are marketing to. Personas are created by an extensive amount of market research and using a customer journey map. These maps show marketers not only the core details about the potential customer, but also how individuals are interacting and participating with the business (Digital Marketing Institute, 2018).
The Role of Market Research in Identifying Needs
Market research plays an important role in refining these personas and making them truly the ideal customer. Research can inform marketers of anything from the way that customers behave online to what they value and are interested in offline. Market research also looks into what is popular amongst different groups. For example, the pop culture references that Generation Z might find funny and trending are most likely not the same things that Millenials find funny or relatable (Moz). The customer journey map goes through all of the different stages when interacting with your brand, making it easier to track where you might be able to connect with your audience.
Sprout Social did an entire study that emphasized the need to understand generational differences. Marketing strategies are not one size fits all, and it is really important to understand all of the factors that audiences are looking for in successful marketing (Sprout Social). It might not even include the content itself; it could come down to the delivery of the content. TikTok is one of the latest trending platforms with Gen Z, but for Baby Boomers, Facebook or LinkedIn, might be more popular as they are deemed to be more mature platforms. Each platform has different purposes, too, that may impact which audiences are tuning in to which platforms. TikTok is much more entertainment-based, while LinkedIn is more information-based.
Creating Personas
As mentioned above, one of the most popular ways for targeting a more diverse audience is to create a customer persona using market research. Personas are semi-fictional representations of the ideal customers. Here are some examples of what your audience personas could potentially look like if you are targeting 2 different age groups.
Millennial Mom (Age 25-40): Uses Instagram and TikTok for entertainment and communication. Wanting to use a more sustainable product base, looks for transparency within brands and wants to support brands that are clean.
Gen Z Daughter (Age 16-24): Uses TikTok and Threads for information, news, and entertainment. Looks up to influencers on these platforms and takes what they say very seriously. Wants brands to be authentic and trusts brands that her favorite influencers endorse.
These personas are varying in information but give you a pretty strong picture about what the audience looks like that you are trying to market to. A mom-and-daughter duo is a common age gap that many marketers are trying to bring together through some products. Each persona should include enough basic information to paint an accurate picture for the marketer. It should give the marketer a glimpse into what the persona needs and is looking for in a social media advertisement.
Platform Preferences
Different platforms appeal to different age groups and personas. Understanding which platforms are popular for your persona is just as important as the persona itself. If your audience is spanning across many different generations or target audience groups, it will most likely mean that you will need to know how to tailor your marketing to several different platforms.
Each platform has its own personality, and its own type of content that it caters best. For example, TikTok is a short-form video platform that relies on user-generated content for its platform. This is a storytelling platform that includes dancing, skits, and challenges. LinkedIn aims to reach a more professional audience. The content is more focused on careers and professional development through blog posts, personal testimonies, and advertisements from organizations.
Both have their own personality of content that gets posted and both are catering to a slightly different persona. Understanding the type of content, audience members, and best practices for multiple platforms is important to be able to move your marketing across all platforms swiftly. For more information about creating compelling content, check out my classmate's article here!
Cross-Generational Appeal
Once you nail down your persona, and the platforms you will be using, you must then create content that is optimized for different genertions. Each generation has its own preferences on what they want to see, but there are a few strategies that are able to resonate with a much broader audience:
Repurposing: This includes taking a single piece of content and changing the style and tone to be accurate across various platforms. For example, a long-form blog can be modified into a preview post on Instagram.
Interactive elements: Everyone loves being able to interact with the posts that they are viewing. This can look like polls or quizzes to a call-to-action to interact with the comments. This is a great way to boost engagement, but it also starts the conversation and gets people involved with your posts.
Review
Having a diverse audience should not be seen as a challenge or impossible in marketing. With thorough planning, specific research, and a willingness to be flexible, marketing to diverse audiences is more than possible. Understanding what goes into making a customer persona, as well as how important personas are, and understanding the many different social media platforms available, you should be able to successfully market across a large, diverse audience. Delivering specific content to meet the needs of all your customers should be the number one goal of all successful marketing plans.
Good luck and get to marketing!
Resources
Digital Marketing Institute. (2018, February 5). How to optimize your organization’s marketing strategy. Digital Management and Leadership. https://.digitalmarketinginstitute.com
Ellis, M. (2024, June 24). How to actually be better than your competitors in the eyes of choosy customers. Moz. https://www.moz.com
Sprout Social. (n.d.). The generational marketing playbook: How to engage every age group on social. Sprout Social Blog. https://www.sproutsocial.com
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