What's the Difference Between Your Audience and Database
Your marketing database is one of the most important assets you own – without it you can't execute campaigns targeted to the people you know are interested in your products because they've made a purchase or they have signed up to receive information from you.It's a common misconception that your audience and your marketing database are one and the same, and while there is certainly an overlap between the two groups, your audience is comprised of the people who actively or passively consume your content but who aren't existing customers. They're the ones who would miss your newsletter, social media feed or promotional activities if you were to stop creating and distributing your material.
Your audience is an engaged group of people who actually want to hear from you, even if they haven't yet made a purchase. They're the ones who have willingly handed over their contact details because they can see a future value in staying engaged with you and your company. To think about it another way, if someone signs up to receive emails from you and contacts the sales team for more information and they are immediately contacted by the sales team who want to convert that warm lead straight away they'll appreciate this (putting them into your marketing database category).If someone only signs up for future information they're part of your audience and not ready to purchase just yet.
When developing customer personas to help you understand who your customers are and what they want it's also useful to look at audience personas, those hypothetical people who are interested in what you have to say and the wider context around why they could be customers.What drives them? What is important to them?What are their wider aspirations? Understanding these things about your audience means you can identify strategies and stories that will appeal to various segments of your audience. Tailored content is always going to perform better than mass campaigns, so by truly digging into your audience personas you can ensure you're appealing more directly to those people and they feel understood.
When you market to your audience you're marketing to a soft audience – these are people who don't want to hear the hard sell, and they're interested in forming a longer term relationship with your brand. They're learning from you, improving your reputation as a leading light in your industry and spreading this knowledge (as well as the source) to their network, so they can actually be a very lucrative part of your long term marketing strategy.
Observing what actions your audience takes can help grow your audience, as well as inform new product or service decisions – the content with the highest rate of engagement is the topic they're most interested in, and if they share this content with their network it shows that there's a much wider audience out there who haven't become part of your unique audience yet, but they will in time. This means you can grow new markets and new demographics for your products and services that will lead to sales and business growth over time.
Of course, well executed marketing campaigns can bring leads and revenue through the door in the short term, but in the medium to longer terms you need to be attentive to your audience and how to grow that audience to ensure the success of your business and continued growth.
