Are you marketing to the same audience?

Are you marketing to the same audience? If you aren’t, you’re missing both an opportunity and a problem.

As marketers, our audience is our raw material. From audience, we grow evangelists, prospects, leads, revenue, and reputation. We need our audience to do even the most basic marketing work. If we were chefs in the kitchen, our audience would be our ingredients, from which we’d weave culinary magic.

Suppose we set out to make an omelet, but we were fresh out of chicken eggs. We did, however, have a carton of liquid egg product in the refrigerator. Could we make the same omelet? We could certainly make something like an omelet, but it wouldn’t be exactly the same as with fresh-cracked eggs. Suppose that carton was liquid egg whites only. Could we make the same omelet? Not at all. We could still make something delicious, but it wouldn’t resemble our omelet at all.

In the same way, if our audience varies from platform to platform, what we can make of that audience will vary significantly. Some audiences may be well-suited for lead generation. Others may be ideal for reputation and brand building.

How would we determine if our audiences are similar or different? Here’s a simple way to test. First, ensure you have demographics and interests turned on in Google Analytics for your website:

Next, take a look at your website audience’s basic demographics:

And your website audience’s interests:

Make note of what interests your audience; this data comes from Google’s DoubleClick advertising network.

Next, head to your Twitter analytics account at analytics.twitter.com. Check your audience’s demographics:

And check your audience’s interests:

How different is your Twitter data from your Google Analytics data? Do you see significant variations between the two? Are they remarkably similar?

Let’s next look at Facebook. Head over to Facebook Audience Insights:

Again, compare your Facebook data to your Twitter and Google Analytics data. How do the audiences compare – are they similar or different?

What do we do with this knowledge?

If our audiences are substantially similar, our next step is to investigate our conversion data to see which of our channels our audiences finds the most value in, and increase our efforts there.

If our audiences are substantially different, we must ask why. Why is Twitter or Facebook different from Google Analytics? Is there a sizable portion of our audience we’re leaving behind? Is there a part of our audience we’re not engaging?

To return to our cooking analogy, if we’re not starting with the same ingredients, we should understand what we have before we try to cook with it. If we’re not starting with the same audiences, we should understand them better before we try one-size-fits-all marketing to them.

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