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Why we care about audience development

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How will you reach your audiences?

Despite the sea of information available to the 4.95 billion internet users today, fresh content is being generated by the second. Producing engaging content that can distinguish itself within this volume takes a considerable amount of time and effort. In this context, it is critical to develop strategies to keep your audience engaged and further develop your customer base.

It is ironic that social media, one of the most potent conduits of content, is also the force behind the attrition of our attention. With a profusion of content competing for short attention spans, keeping your audience engaged is an increasingly challenging endeavor. However, having a robust audience development plan can help combat this problem.

Audience development is not about volume alone. Of course, marketers like reach, but in an environment where competitors are only a click away, deeper engagement based on trust and an authentic value exchange is of premium value. The value exchange involves delivering valuable content that meets the audience’s needs — not just promotional messaging. It involves performance metrics and optimization to grow the audience and keep it coming back for more.

The key points this article will cover include:

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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What is audience development?

Broadly defined, audience development is the process of keeping your audience engaged with your business. It starts with getting new consumers to pay attention to your brand, converting them to customers, and finally, building a long-term relationship to foster loyalty amongst those customers. Think of audience development as a timeline that involves attracting customers to your brand and keeping them loyal to your business over time.

Regardless of your industry or business model, customers are essential to running a successful business and the ultimate goal of audience development is to eventually convert the audience for your content into paying customers. How you employ audience development strategies to eventually achieve that goal depends on the context of your business.

With content being produced to cater to every possible niche, it’s difficult to stand out from the competition and keep your audience engaged. You need to have a detailed understanding of your current customer base, and segments within it, to develop strategies that work. This involves putting your audience first and thinking from their perspective.

High-impact audience development strategies

While the best strategies are always context-specific, there are general guidelines that can help with most audience development initiatives. However, marketers need to be mindful of changing customer characteristics and the external environment in which their company operates. The strategies you use should be dynamic and adaptable for maximal impact on consumers.

Why we care about audience development

Here are the factors to consider while developing high-impact audience development strategies:

Get to know your demographic. The first step is to figure out who your audience is. What kind of customers do you want to attract to your brand? Next, divide your customers into segments that include age, gender, and geography. Understand which segment shows the highest engagement with your brand. Do you want to develop this segment further? Perhaps it’s already too saturated, and it makes more sense to chase a new target segment.

Competitor benchmarking can help with this process. For example, what kind of content and campaigns are your competitors running? Who are they targeting? By keeping a close watch over your competitors’ audience development strategies, you can identify which segments are the most reactive and use that data to inform your strategy.

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Develop a content strategy. When you know your demographic and have gained familiarity with the marketing practices in your industry, it becomes much easier to develop content that resonates with your audience. You can use a multi-channel strategy that includes producing content for your website, emailing your audience, or leveraging social media platforms to connect with them. Using emerging platforms such as Twitch or Tik-Tok can be effective if you target young consumers.

Define your content team. Figure out who is going to produce your content. The value your content delivers to your customers is crucial. Do you have a team of in-house marketers proficient in developing the kind of content you seek, or would you need to hire external resources? Are you creating a multi-part or a one-time campaign? Further, using the right content management tools to produce effective content is key.

Track metrics and optimize. You need to track the metrics of your content or campaign using content management tools. How many views, clicks, reads, or likes do you get per post? This data will help you fine-tune your future content and improve with each iteration. While your content might be good, it’s futile to use it if it doesn’t reach or engage your target audience.

Optimizing your content for search engines is vital to producing engagement. Make sure your articles have keywords and phrases that are likely to appear in a Google search for the kind of product or service your company sells. Each platform has its unique way of optimizing content for maximum traffic, so it would be worth your while to become familiar with these differences. For example, if you plan to use Twitter or Instagram, ensure you use the right hashtags and captions to reach the most people.

Use tech to optimize audience development

Data and technology can help you understand your audience and optimize your audience development strategies. Businesses that leverage data early to understand their customers are a step ahead of their competition.

Marketing analytics has considerably improved businesses’ ability to track their metrics and develop high-impact strategies. For example, marketing analytics tools measure the performance of your campaign across an array of metrics and use those insights to inform you of the best ways to optimize your content. These tools also give you the bigger picture by linking your campaigns to your website traffic. This enables you to track your multi-channel approach and understand which tactics and campaigns are creating the deepest impact on customer behavior.

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Topic analysis tools show you how your target audience behaves online. These tools help you create online personas for your customers to develop the best strategies to attract their attention. Additionally, analytics software let you track the success of each campaign and identify areas for improvement. For example, Google Analytics is an effective tool that offers you data-driven insights on how visitors engage with your site. Common metrics include when customers visit your site, which page they first clicked on, and how long they spent consuming your content. It also helps you track basic demographic data such as your customers’ age, gender, and location.

Leveraging data obtained through such tools is the backbone of an effective audience development strategy. Data and analytics tools play a critical role throughout the process, from getting to know your audience to producing and tracking your content.

How does audience development add value to your business?

Engaged audiences are more likely to seek out your content actively. They are also more likely to buy your products and refer them to other potential customers through word-of-mouth marketing. This makes an engaged audience highly valuable for your business because it contributes to your sales revenue.

The most significant advantages of audience development are:

  • Customer acquisition: Since expanding your customer base is a key factor determining the growth of your business, your marketing efforts should consider customer acquisition as one of the primary goals. This can be achieved through referrals and targeted advertising.
  • Building relationships: Audience development is also a qualitative process centered on relationship-building. Marketers should focus on developing quality relationships with existing and new customers.
  • Improving customer loyalty: Nudging your current customers to keep coming back and selecting your business over the competition is one of the most efficient ways to increase sales. Since new customer acquisition costs can be high, getting repeat business from current customers is a relatively cheaper alternative.

It’s worthwhile to invest in developing your audience and engaging it effectively through interesting, value-adding content. Engaged audiences tend to make more frequent and higher-value transactions.

Resources for learning about audience development

Here are some helpful resources to help your brand’s audience development efforts:


About The Author

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Why we care about social media marketing A guide forWhy we care about social media marketing A guide for
Akshat Biyani is a Contributing Editor to MarTech, a former analyst who has a strong interest in writing about technology and its effect on marketing.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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