Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy: 5 Tips for Getting to Know Your Target Audience Better

Your customers are the most critical piece to your business – and getting to know them well is crucial. Consumer media viewing habits and buying habits continually change, and each target audience is unique in how they want to be reached by brands, what products they buy, and which services they’re looking for. Audiences are also consuming content in more ways than ever – from TV to streaming, podcasts to news websites.  

With spring in full bloom, everyone is coming out of hibernation, making now the perfect time to reintroduce your brand to the masses. It’s also an excellent time to refamiliarize yourself with your target audience. Consider it a spring cleaning of sorts. By doing so, old strategies can be given new life with a little bit of dusting and polish.  

Here are our tips for spring-cleaning your marketing strategy:  

1. Revisit Customer Personas

Who is your target audience? Women? Men? Boomers? Millennials? Revisit who benefits from your product or service and identify if their demographics have changed since the last time you reviewed customer persona profiles. Add or update any new interests or hobbies they might have acquired, their purchasing power and intentions, where they’re located, and what motivates them.  

Refreshing your customer persona profiles is key to knowing your target audience, which can help inform your ad creative in new ways. For example, if you find your target audience prefers indie music, you can use that genre in ad creative to catch their attention. It can also help determine the best ways to reach them and on what platforms. HubSpot has a great resource that can help create these personas.

2. Revisit the Customer Journey

When did you last consider your customer’s buying journey? Take some time to revisit the buying cycle and alleviate pain points where appropriate. This means giving your website an audit, clicking on your digital ads, visiting your brick-and-mortar location, and so on.

Another way to create a better user experience is to ask engaging questions to get important feedback. Survey emails are a great way to ask for ratings and reviews, which are also key in measuring your customer’s happiness. As the cherry on top, reviews are also key for prospects. New research from BrightLocal finds that 49% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members.

3. Learn More About Audiences with Insights & Industry Trends

Speaking of new research, keeping up with industry trends and news can give you ideas to adjust your marketing strategy to ensure your brand remains competitive and relevant. Original research and e-books are also great places to gather information about a target audience’s mindset.  

• For example, TEGNA has released two original research reports: Mastering the Millennial Mindset and Unlocking the Car Buyer of Today. 

Consider meeting with your local TV station’s research director or account executive (click here to find yours) to see what insights they can pull for your target audience. From understanding consumer habits to conducting custom research, these experts can help you more effectively connect with your audience.

4. Start Collecting First-Party Data (If you aren’t already)

We’re going into a cookieless marketing world, and collecting first-party data can help you get to know your audiences better. You can collect this data through customer feedback, surveys, CRM data, social media, email lists, and analytics. Once collected, the data could provide insights into customer lifecycles, allow for retargeting opportunities, help you break into new markets, develop new products, and more.  

Better yet, a study from Google found that businesses “using first-party data for key marketing functions achieved up to a 2.9 times revenue uplift and a 1.5 times increase in cost savings.”  

 5. Dig into Measurement & Analytics

When digging into your audience’s preferences, you’ll want to gather as much information as possible to learn what messaging they respond to, what platforms they engage with, their attitudes, buying power, and more. This includes digging into Google Analytics, social media metrics, and, for TV advertisers, dig into your TEGNA Attribution reports which connect the dots between TV and streaming viewing habits with outcome metrics such as website visits, app downloads, and more. With these insights, you can tell which creative and dayparts are driving the most impact for your media plan. 

About TEGNA 

As one of the nation’s largest local media organizations and marketing partners, we’re focused on making sure our advertisers can reach diverse audiences to help drive better business outcomes. Let’s get in touch and see how we can help you reach your ideal audience.