As a business professional who works with a brand, everything you do is not for your own benefit, but for the benefit of an audience. After all, if you didn’t have an audience, delivering a message would be like shouting into an open expanse only to hear your voice echo. Who would buy your product or service? Identifying your audience is the first step to knowing which direction to take when it comes to marketing yourself. This is especially true online, since there are billions of visitors and billions of pages hanging around on the web. Yet still, so many brands that advertise through the online space still don’t know they’re speaking to and fail to bring in the results they plan for. Hiring an online marketing agency can help you to quickly identify who exactly you need to engage with and how you should go about doing so quickly.

The Digital Tools of Discovery

Before you can deliver your message to an audience, you need to identify who they are first. But identifying an audience is easier said than done. Nowadays, audiences are segmented yet broad at the same time. This sounds like a paradox – and it is – but the truth is that even within a large audience that share common traits, there are individuals who are very different and unique from one another. For example, the coveted 18 – 34 year-old demographic of young adults is a gold mine for companies in the video game, electronic, and retail industries. However, within this demographic range are things like subculture, occupation, and marital status that can either attract or deter a young consumer from a product or service. A good online marketing agency will help you draw the line between who is who, thus allowing you to deliver the right content to the right person. Here’s how they do it:

Quantitative and Qualitative Research

For a general view or snapshot of who your prospects are, surveys and polls are a great way to get acquainted with an audience. These can be qualitative or quantitative in nature. The agency may conduct these surveys and polls on their own through blogs, e-mails, or dedicated survey sites. They may even opt to have survey specialists or market researchers to conduct in-person interviews or focus groups to gauge the prevailing attitude of the target audience sampled. Having a general view of an audience can create guidelines for online marketing professionals so that they can look deeper within the target group to find true insights.

Eavesdropping on Social Media

At some point though, you will need to go deeper for a clearer view of who you need to concentrate on. While surveys are great for gaining an overall view of who your demographic could be, they don’t give you all the insight. This is where social media comes in. Digital agencies spend more time than ever paying attention to posts, tweets, likes, pluses, and pins streaming from the online community. Why? Social media exposes users in candid ways. By scanning the profiles and their social media engagement, marketers learn their jargon, slang, opinions, attitudes and other qualities that serve as indicators as to who is who and what they want. A competent digital marketing agency will scan the social media landscape and give you a much clearer picture as to who your audience may be.

Digging Deep

Many agencies go even further to help you understand the demographics of your potential audience. Aside from knowing the basics and their lingo, having a deeper awareness of who your audience is will improve your marketing efforts greatly. A marketing agency may use demographic profiling tools that can help you uncover geographic data and age and gender insights. These tools monitor social behaviour online, and create personality labels for these users so that you can establish their patterns on the web. Not only does this give you a unique window of how your audience thinks, but it also allows you to tailor marketing efforts that follows their patterns. This is important, since consumers want the web to fit their habits and preferences.

If you are in the process of identifying and defining your target audience, consider hiring an online marketing expert. They can use the above-mentioned methods with skill and precision to help you determine who exactly your content should target.

The Tools of Execution

Once an agency discovers who your audience is, they will then devise a plan of attack to target them with your message. Many professionals view SEO as a restrictive and boring medium to help spread a brand’s message, and they view its big brother brand advertising as the most effective. The truth is that SEO uses many methods to direct your audience to your message, and just like traditional advertising, it requires lateral thinking to be successful.

The Keyword is Your Keywords

Just about everyone who knows what SEO is about knows that it involves keywords, and you most likely have encountered them before. Even though your average web surfer is not familiar with the science of keyword optimization, they certainly appreciate the results that search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo deliver. While some businesses may feel that they understand the art of optimizing their websites keywords, the reality is that an SEO agency is more experienced and versed in the process and will typically generate a higher rate of success. With the expertise of specialists, a professional agency chooses keywords based on your objectives and the desires of consumers. Copywriters then use these keywords and weave them into unique content that is relevant, fresh, and ready to be shared. 

 Adding Different Spices into the Mix

Another way today’s online marketing agencies can help you reach your audience is by their use of multiple forms of media. Once upon a time, it was fine for marketers to rely solely on bland web pages to drive traffic. However, web surfers don’t only read web pages anymore. They read blogs, watch videos, listen to podcasts, play games, and communicate through social media. This further demonstrates the fragmented nature of audiences, and the need to reach them all across the board. businesses and agencies alike can no longer get away with optimizing purely for websites, they now must take an agnostic approach to delivering a message. A good online marketing company can help you adapt your message to fit all of the new media that your audience seeks to engage.

Making Visitors Permanent Residents

Always be sure to create content that is compelling and buzz worthy. Ranking and exposure is all fine and dandy, but keeping a loyal and returning audience is a different story. Visitors spend very little time when looking for something, and it takes is a few seconds for them to determine whether or not they will stick around. This means you need to grasp your audience’s attention immediately for any chance of retention. Relevant content from copywriters and appealing visuals from designers and other members of the team is what keeps your audience interested. They will also create content that fits the demographic and psychographic profiles that their previous research uncovered, in order to make a deeper connection with them.

A Qualified Online Marketing Agency is a Window to Your Audience

Discovering your audience shouldn’t feel like a game of darts, where you hope that your message will strike the right section of the population. While it is more difficult to identify exactly who your audience is, the tools and knowledge are out there to help you get a better breakdown of who your content should target. Hiring a qualified marketing firm is a great way to gain access to these tools and add benefits your marketing efforts. Not only will they help you find out who your prospects are, they will also ensure that you use the most effective tools in the most effective ways to grab their attention and have them wanting more from you. Take advantage of SEO and other digital marketing strategies. You will reap the benefits of knowing your audience, and you will know how to speak to them.