Your audience and your online business.
Define your audience at the beginning of your online business, and develop a value proposition that works for them.
Who do you want to hang out with?
There are lots of decisions to make when you start your online journey. This is one of the most crucial.
If you are starting a journey with a group of people and that journey is going to take many years, choosing carefully who you are going on that journey with can make for a more enjoyable experience.
You may not be packed into a mini-bus and sharing accommodation each evening, but you are going to be spending quality time together.
Being able to relate to and understand your audience can be key to the success of your online business.
Over time you will learn more about your audience for your online business and potentially expand your audience and target markets. But having an audience you have some familiarity with at the outset can give you a headstart.
Your audience is your target market.
They are who you will aim your marketing and sales efforts at.
You may already know them.
They may be part of the reason why you are starting this journey. For example, I started Girls that SUP in order to connect with and share stories of female paddleboarders so that I could encourage more women into the sport and go some way to address the current gender imbalance.
By contrast, one of my first businesses, I went in with a product, full steam ahead and never stopped to think about the sort of audience it attracted. I was interested in giving people an affordable website option, not realising that I would attract customers that were cheap and stingy, not willing to pay for expertise or those that didn’t understand business. Uggh. That meant I was surrounding myself with unsuccessful people. I also attracted some really inspiring people at the start of their journeys and got to work with them as went from strength to strength. I realised ‘That’s my target market, that’s who I want to work with’. That was part of the initial idea for Your Online Journey.
Time is the most valuable commodity you and I each have. Choose who you want to spend it with.
I want to work with motivated, driven, ambitious people who are willing to put the hard work in to succeed. That’s going to require consistency, strength, resilience and stoicism. I also want to surround myself with people that are ethical and compassionate. I don’t believe you need to trample people to get to success, doesn’t empowering each other and working towards a better world sound better? I hope, if you are reading this, that you are one of those people.
When you work with the audience (humans) that you want to be working with, then you will energise, inspire and lift each other up. Sound good?
If you can write, draw or capture in bullet points who your ideal audience is. That’s a great start.
Important Audience Characteristics to Know
There’s other details you will need to add in to understand your audience.
When going into Facebook and targeting adverts, you will need to know things like: gender, age, education level, geographic location, etc. to shape my audiences.
Learn more about how to find and target your audience on social media here.
You will need to know where they like to hang out, what their interests are and what will get their attention.
So simply being able to describe your audience in an aspirational way isn’t enough. You need to get down into the nitty gritty a develop a deep understanding of your audience.
Learn more about brand story-telling
Learn more about target audience definition here.
Audience building strategy
Watch this great video from James Wedmore on audience building strategy for online business.