idbd:focus

The 3 Most Important Words in Marketing

Years ago while I was climbing the ladder in my career, I was employed by a major network in one of the top 5 television markets in the country. I was extremely fortunate to work with some amazingly talented and knowledgeable people. One of my coworkers, who had been with the network for a long time, gave me some advice when I started with the company. This advice... just 3 little words... ended up being one of the most important lessons in both my professional and personal life that I can still hear as if it were yesterday:

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

So what did this mean? 

To connect with your target market, you must first engage your audience and capture their attention. To accomplish this, you first need to understand the difference between your target market and target audience.

A target market is a group of potential customers that a brand focuses its marketing efforts on to sell its products and/or services. This group is based on different variables, such as location, age, lifestyle, social class, ethnicity, behavior, etc., and is determined during the early stages of creating a brand marketing strategy.

A target audience is a part of the target market and consists of those who either make the decision to buy a brand's products and/or services or influences the decision to buy. When focusing on an audience, the aim should be on the audience's interests and value your products and services hold for that audience. You want your audience to become engaged and share their experiences of your product and/or service to create more visibility and grow your brand.

Knowing your target audience is crucial to the success of your brand. Connecting with them these days requires a strong content marketing strategy that includes positioning your brand as an industry authority, providing useful and informative content, engaging the audience on social media and attaining more traffic through online searches.

Understanding these principles... and those 3 little words in particular... made all the difference in my career – and eventually in my own business. 

The coworker who enlightened me all those years ago with this important lesson has since become a mentor and good friend. Thank you JJ!