5 Mistakes To Avoid When Building Your Audience

Have you ever launched a product with a valuable offer, beautiful graphics, and a great website, and yet it totally failed? If this has happened to you, there may be a schism between your message and the audience receiving it. 

Building a targeted audience doesn’t have to be hard, but it does take hard work. Knowing your audience and their wants and needs will help you provide quality content for them to consume and will help you quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. 

It is important to be aware of common mistakes in audience building that you could be making, and more importantly how these mistakes can be avoided when launching your business. The mistakes listed below can all lead to a loss of money, poor conversion, or improperly targeting an audience, among other things. Keep them in mind so that you know what not to do and can ensure that your product will reach your desired audience and encourage them to take positive action. 

5 mistakes to avoid when building your audience:

1. Making assumptions about your audience: 

Often, business owners may assume that they truly know their target audience, but it turns out that their understanding is based on incorrect assumptions about their customers. It is important never to just trust your gut when it comes to your audience because if your gut happens to be wrong, your entire business will feel the effects. Instead, take the time to get to know your audience first, before planning out what kind of message will convince them to buy your product, read your content, or hire your services. Once you have a good sense of who your audience is (age range, demographics, locations, habits, likes, dislikes, wants, needs, problems, etc.) then you can plan for how best to engage and retain them as customers. Remember that your idea of your target audience may be just that- an idea- and might not truly match the reality of who your customers are; there are plenty of ways to find out more about your target audience so that you can build a thorough and accurate understanding. 

2. Failing to adapt your business to new trends: 

One of the biggest mistakes to avoid when determining your target audience is not adapting business/products/services when new evidence suggests you may have missed the mark. Whether your demographic changed due to changes in your industry or you simply didn’t get it right the first time, you need to be open to change. The ability to adapt to people, situations, and surroundings will afford your audience a greater opportunity to get what they want and need from your business. 

3. Incorrectly analyzing your data: 

A solid ability to analyze your business and consumer data are just as important as knowing your target audience— failure to accurately analyze your data can cause a misalignment between your business and your audience and can be a major waste of time and resources. Tracking your website analytics will tell you all sorts of useful information, such as what content is performing best, which products are most favored, how well your traffic is doing, levels of engagement, and more. If you find that any part of your business isn’t performing as you’d hope, it’s time to carefully review your data to figure out exactly where the issues are. Google Analytics is a great resource that can give you important metrics needed to evaluate your websites such as bounce rate, engagement level, views, and more. 

4. Not segmenting your audience: 

Breaking your target audience down into smaller segments is one of the most important tasks an entrepreneur can do in order to have a successful marketing strategy.  Having well-defined customer segments enables marketers to develop products, services, and content that specifically captures the attention of each segment which will help increase your customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.  

5. Not having an end goal:

 Failing to set a clear plan and/or to identify a concrete end goal can be extremely detrimental. This is a crucial part of your campaign and is highly influential in getting you optimum results. Knowing exactly who your efforts are geared to and why, as well as what you ultimately want to achieve for them and accomplish for yourself is imperative. 

At the end of the day, knowing your audience can have the biggest impact on your success and is a foundational step to any good business strategy.  It is also an important way of preserving and enhancing your business’s reputation. Mistakes are inevitable but you have been forewarned— don’t let these common mistakes get in your way!