Validating your marketing audience

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One of our toughest challenges in marketing is new people – specifically, how to find the right new people to keep our businesses growing. Without new audiences, without new growth at the top of the funnel, our businesses will tread water at best, if not decline. In the bad old days of marketing, we had to take out massive numbers of advertisements to very broad audiences in the hopes of catching the attention of a tiny piece of a part of the audience that we actually wanted to do business with. We had no idea who our audiences were, and certainly no way to tell who they should be.

Today, things are a little better. Thanks to the abundance of data from social media and digital marketing analytics tools, we can gain an understanding of who our audience is, and who it should be. Let’s look now at how to determine whether our company’s audience is aligned with the broader audience we could have.

We’ll start with the characteristics of your existing audience. For this, we’ll use Google Analytics. If you don’t have demographics turned on, now would be the time to do that. (if you don’t know how, I’m available for hire through my employer 😉 )

We’ll use my website data as the example. Here’s the broad demographics of my audience.

What we see here is a sweet spot of sorts, ages 25-54 where the bulk of my visitors are coming from. That’s one thing to note. There’s a gender imbalance, about 3:2 in favor of males. Is this good? Is this bad? I don’t know yet. Let’s keep digging.

I can also look at their interests:

Finally, I can go search – assuming my Google Analytics is tied to my Webmaster Tools account – to see how people are finding my website.

So now I’ve got a reasonably good starting place to understand my audience. From here we’ll flip over to Facebook Audience Insights, part of the Facebook advertising suite. If I plug in some of the basic characteristics of my audience, like age and topic (marketing), I can see what that audience looks like.

There’s an immediate and painful disparity: Facebook shows me that the gender balance for marketing folks is 2:1 female. My audience is a mismatch to the broad population. Now suppose I want to reach executives in digital marketing. I’d restrict the annual income to over $100K household income:

Now I’ve got a sense of what my audience should look like versus the reality of what it is today.

At this point it’s safe to draw a conclusion: my audience could and should look a little different than it currently does. Since I just built this exact audience on Facebook using their Audience Insights tool, I could simply hit the advertising button and start showing ads to them immediately. I could also do some research to find out where else this audience spends time online and look at those outlets for either advertising or contributed content opportunities.

So to paraphrase the popular credit card slogan: what’s in your audience? Go find out and then see if it’s in alignment with reality.

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