Identify, Clarify & Magnify your Target Audience

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to a brand-new episode on the Making of a Thought Leader podcast. Building thought leadership can seem overwhelming to begin with. But when thought through systematically and consistently it can bring optimum results. Before we get into this episode, I'd like to say, thank you to all my listeners for tuning into the show regularly. 

[00:00:28] If you are here for the first time, thank you for choosing to spend time with me. And I'm sure this value packed episode will not disappoint you. Today's episode is titled - identify clarify and magnify your target audience. And we are going to go all of that in the context of building one's thought leadership. 

[00:00:54] Why should you think of target audience while building thought  leadership? Is it not true that thought leadership content has to be given away free, so why there is a fuss about the audience at all? Identifying target audience in your niche, can feel like an additional task while building one's thought leadership. 

[00:01:19] You may think, you know who your target audience is roughly, and you may have an idea of who you want to engage with. Unless it is in black and white on a piece of paper, you may only have a guesstimate of who you are after. As a foundational step to building thought leadership, it is critical not to skip this step. 

[00:01:47] I'm the founder of digital genie, a boutique marketing company. And quite often when I meet new clients, my first question to them is who is your target audience? The two most common answers I get because I'm in the B2B side of the business is. Most decision-makers are our target audience or anyone who is interested in digital transformation is our client. 

[00:02:15] Well, both answers may feel appropriate, but they are really far from it. They may be a total addressable market for these businesses. But in no way they are their target audience. When building thought leadership, identifying your target audience helps you at multiple levels. Not only it allows you to engage with the audience in a meaningful way. 

[00:02:40] It also opens up a two-way conversation, which multiplies itself into a feedback mechanism. In episode seven we spoke about is thought leadership only for individuals, or can it be applied to organizations too? And we established that thought leadership is in fact for everyone and everyone must build theirs sooner than later. 

[00:03:06] The first step in identifying target audience should be the buyer persona of your company. You have them right? If you do not have them documented or documented by persona for your organization, please get in touch with us at digital Genie today. 

[00:03:31] If you are starting off from scratch, or if you're on your own at an individual basis, you may grab the free buyer persona template from digital Genie's website. Which is buyerpersona.digitalgenie.co. And use it to get started. It is common to not fill the template as demographics of your audience may seem a bit too much to get to. Or sometimes we do not want to accept the [00:04:00] fact that we may not know all the details. 

[00:04:04] The idea of this template is to help you get started. And it is important to get started, not to get it all right in the first instance. As I always say, buyer personas are living document. They are not like projects, which you start and finish after it's done. 

[00:04:24] So you have the template and the demographics filled in. The template then has psychographics, which are the behavior patterns of your target customers, their likes, their dislikes, their aspirations and much more. These details are the ones which will help you the most to engage your target audience. But they're also very hard to get to. 

[00:04:50] The way you can get to the psychographic details is only via demographic details. When you start working on the template, it is common to get mixed up with two or three persona types. You can always separate them, have, uh, have a document. For each of the type. 

[00:05:10] From a business perspective, it is easier to narrow down the audience as you are ultimately building trust of your audience through thought leadership. More focused and filtered down the audiences, it is easier to start meaningful conversations with them. Clarifying who are your target audiences is essential too. 

[00:05:36] One way to clarify is through research. Research your competitors messaging and identify the gaps in their communication. These gaps can be addressed by your thought leadership content. Let's imagine three concentric circles, like on a dart board. The inner most circle is where your true target [00:06:00] audience is. The number may be very small to begin with, and that is fine. 

[00:06:07] Seth Godin is my favorite thought leader on marketing talks about minimum viable audience. What he shares is that you cannot possibly sell to everyone. If you could pick the smallest possible group of people and are able to delight them. With your content and conversations and are also able to not get distracted with others, however, attractive the scene, then you'll end up with two things. 

[00:06:32] One, the audience will go and tell others and to you and have a lot more than you began with a lot more audience that is. When you use your buyer persona template and identify the group who's in the bulls-eye circle. Circle communicate with. Them create conversations and you will start seeing the clarification in who is your real target audience? I'm not saying that the second and the third set of concentric circles are not important. Perhaps your efforts to keep them in those circles are on a lower focus level. The whole exercise is to identify and clarify. Your audience helps you to put them in an order of your focus. 

[00:07:22] The last step is to magnify your target audience. Which means knowing them well enough to appeal to them. Today we are inundated with so much content that it is. It has become hard to focus and consume messages like in the past. Likewise thought leadership content only matters if people read it. If it helps them in their routine of life and work. Magnifying your audience will help you develop thought leadership that is deep to a few clicks down in the niche that you're addressing. It will help you meet your target audience at a level where the ideas or the thoughts that are simply in their heads as a mental chatter. Such conversations will then bring home those who are seeking such knowledge instead of you having to find them constantly. 

[00:08:19] Each piece of thought leadership content should speak to an audience as specifically as possible. Let's say the content is for CXO. Now, this is not precise enough. Because there are CIO CMO, CHROs. And all the other kinds of functional roles in the different parts of businesses. This does not imply that all part leadership content should speak to the same audience or deliver ideas along single trajectory. 

[00:08:53] Organizations may choose to deliver thought leadership for market positioning and technology leadership at the same time. And, but in a way that the content crosses both business and technical or human resource and financial spectrum. And that can help to be more synergistic and meaningful. insight to the target audience. Each piece of content should target a specific audience. 

[00:09:25] As I mentioned earlier, buyer persona should be a living document for you as a thought leader and also for the business brand too. Before we end today's episode, I would like to share a couple of thoughts about creating thought leadership in today's environment. It is common to get swayed away by the SOS. 

[00:09:47] SOS means the shiny object syndrome. And share an opinion on something because everyone else is doing that, or it has become a trend. Do not make this a common habit. Know that we all have cognitive overload in this time and age and in order to stand out we need to give value to our followers instead of adding our voices to the cacophony. 

[00:10:12] Using distilled idea in simple language and easy to consume format is a winner of hearts and using jargons and long content themes. 

[00:10:22] I hope this episode helped you with thinking about identifying, clarifying and magnifying your target audience as you develop your thought leadership. We have put our thinking on buyer persona on blogs and the links to those are in the show notes below. 

[00:10:39] If I can ask you a tiny favor. Please go on apple podcast and review the show, which will help us improve add or fine tune in the near future. And thank you for that. that said, I will say goodbye to you for now and see you in the next episode of the making of a thought leader podcast. 

https://buyerpersona.digitalgenie.co