You would be surprised how many times I hear from clients and prospects that “everyone” is their target audience.
“Everyone” isn’t your target audience.
It is, like a flashing warning light, a sign that nobody has yet done the work.
(With love, I say this, mostly.)
I’ve sat in countless meetings where a sharp executive says, “We want to reach everyone.” They mean well. They want to reach broadly. They want to reach more. They want the phone to ring. They want the site to convert. They want the media to take notice. They want their market to understand why what they are doing is significant.
No one can fault that.
Communications, though, doesn’t happen by talking louder and longer to the whole crowd. It happens by having clarity about who needs to hear you out, what they need to know about what you are doing, and what you want them to do once you tell them.
You lose all downstream if you don’t do the work to figure out your audiences. Your press release is generic; your media list is lazy; your social posts are noise; your website communicates with anyone in particular; your paid campaigns are for attracting the people who have never been going to buy/donate/invest/attend/apply/care.
That’s not a strategy, though. It’s just expensive guessing.
Highlights
Your target audience isn’t the people who “could be interested in anything.”
Your best audiences are the people who can help move the needle for your business goal.
Strong communications starts with having audience clarity before you talk about messaging, media outreach, content creation, social media engagement or paid advertising.
The work you do for audience research involves data, listening and genuine conversations.
If your message doesn’t match your audience, in its timing and channel habits, it won’t land.
Why knowing your target audiences matters in communications
The best communications isn’t about reaching as many people as possible. It’s about reaching the right people, at the right time, with the right message.
It all sounds easy enough until you sit down to do the work.
A C-suite CEO might need investor confidence.
A nonprofit might need donor buy-in.
A franchisor brand might need franchise candidates.
A healthcare organization might need patients, referring partners and community leaders to listen to the different stories it tells in the same narrative.
An enterprise B2B company might need buyers, industry analysts, trade media and your own team members to be on your side.
Each one of those audiences needs to be treated differently.
That’s why knowing who your audience is matters to a communications strategy: it gives your communications plan structure, helps you figure out what to say, where to say it, how to say it and whether anyone heard and cared.
So, here is what you need to do now, to find the people who are your audience.
1. Begin with the business goal
Not a news release.
Not a media list.
Not a TikTok, because someone in the meeting room saw a competitor do something funny.
A business goal.
First, you need to ask yourself, “ What do we want to have happen?”
Are you after more qualified leads?
Employees who have the necessary skill sets?
More credibility and trust for your fundraising?
Higher attendance for your event?
A successful expansion into a new region?
Do you want to safeguard your reputation during a crisis?
Sell more franchises?
Or, shift public perception of your industry?
The answer determines who you talk to.
Say you are trying to grow your franchise system. In that case, “future franchisee” is a pretty broad audience. If that is who you are talking to, maybe you need to talk to multi-unit operators. It also might be career-changers with a management background. Or existing small-business owners. It could be franchise consultants and bankers and family members with a say in the choice.
Let’s say your focus is more on patient visits. Then your audience is your patients. Your caregivers. Your referral partners. Local employers. Your doctors. The payers. Community groups and non-profits.
Let’s say you want to build thought leadership. Then your audience is the trade publications and event managers, industry analysts, association heads, podcast producers and executives of prospective client companies.
You see the distinction?
The vaguer the goal, the vaguer your audience becomes. Once your audience gets vague, your message becomes mush. And nobody wakes up hoping for message-mush.
2. Distinguish the influencers from the decision-makers
Many brands talk to more than one audience. The error is treating all audiences alike.
They are not.
There are the decision-makers. The influencers. The approvers. The opponents. The users and buyers of your product and service. And those who never buy your product or service but can shape a company’s reputation through the media or word of mouth. Or online reviews and social sharing. Or referrals to customers.
You must know the difference.
An audience map is simple enough to do.
Decision-maker: Approves. Buys. Signs. What they need from you: Evidence, clarity, trust.
Influencer: Shapes perception. What they need from you: shareable info and credibility.
User: Uses the product or service. What they need from you: relevance, ease, support.
Gatekeeper: Controls access/approval. What they need from you: risk mitigation, facts.
Advocate: Makes recommendations. What they need from you: a clear story to retell.
Internal audience: Manages the customer experience. What they need from you: context, consistency, confidence.
This is crucial since each audience requires a different message.
A chief financial officer needs numbers. The customer wants to know how you solve the problem. A journalist needs news. The employee wants to understand the change. The community leader wants to understand what will change for the citizens.
If you communicate the exact same thing to them all, you are just not getting it right. You are being unclear.
3. Base your strategy on real data, not assumptions
Conferring room personas have a habit of becoming fantasy.
You know the drill: “Our ideal customer is an ambitious professional with a need for a quality, on-demand solution.” Cool, but that describes half the population.
Get rid of it.
You want real, concrete inputs.
Here is where you should start:
Website analytics: Which pages are the most popular? What search keywords deliver traffic? Where do visitors drop off?
Sales data: Who buys, exactly? What product does he or she buy first? What is the sales cycle length?
Customer relationship management (CRM) data: Which leads have the highest close rate? The lowest? Which lead source yields the most profitable customers?
Social media analytics: Which audience members interact most? Which content draws the most comments, saves, shares and inbox inquiries?
Media mentions: What stories generate web traffic? Phone calls? Email traffic? Positive sentiment with the audiences you care most about? Questions about customer support.
What do people wonder about before they feel confident in what you offer? How do they search online? What queries are they putting into ChatGPT, Google, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok or LinkedIn?
Next, bring in human insight.
Talk directly with customers. Converse with your sales reps. Speak to staff on the front lines. Engage with those who went with a different company. Reach out to prospects who were nearly ready to sign up, then vanished.
That final group offers the most valuable insights, even if their comments prick a bit.
The goal isn’t to validate your preconceived ideas. The goal is to discover where your preconceived ideas are half-baked, incomplete or completely incorrect.
4. Tune into the language your market really speaks
Corporations tend to prefer elegant language.
People are far more drawn to simple, plain-speak language.
Sometimes, these two worlds are separated by a chasm as deep as the Grand Canyon.
One of the best strategies for uncovering your market is to examine how individuals describe their own challenges. Forget how your C-suite describes them. Forget how your brochures describe them. Instead, watch how everyday people describe their own issues when they’re asking questions, evaluating choices, expressing discontent, writing reviews, looking for answers and deciding what to buy.
Pay attention to:
Online reviews
Transcripts of sales conferences
Responses from surveys
Comments on social platforms
Search keywords
News interviews with company representatives
Frequently Asked Questions sections on rival company websites
Customer service emails
Inquiries posed by attendees at events
Comments left on podcasts
You’re hunting for patterns.
What issues keep surfacing? What terms are people reusing? What worries do they voice? What details are they overlooking? What attributes matter most to them? What pushback seems to make sense? What queries pop up right before they become active?
This is when your messaging begins to become more precise.
Let’s say your business would like to claim: “We provide communications solutions that integrate.”
Meanwhile, your market might be thinking: “We require more high-quality leads and no one grasps how we stand apart.”
Your statement feels marketing-speak. The other sounds like an operational pain point.
Employ their phrasing as your pathway.
This doesn’t involve stealing every single phrase. It means you stop requiring people to convert your communication into a term they can comprehend.
5. Align every market segment with the appropriate medium
Identifying your market is only half the story until you figure out where they devote their attention and where they believe what they read.
These two locations aren’t necessarily identical.
Someone might scroll through Instagram yet believe business journalism. A Chief Executive Officer could flip through LinkedIn yet make a decision after glancing at a sector journal. A suburban mother might learn about an entrepreneur from a Facebook community yet check their validity through Google ratings and neighborhood publications. An entrepreneur looking to buy a franchise might begin with a Google search, view a YouTube video conversation, peruse endorsement articles and then phone current franchisees.
This is why you need a full communications plan to reach them all.
Media you’ve earned may enhance a brand’s authority. Material you own could tackle more complicated questions. The content you share could continue a discussion. The ad space you buy might help you reach more of the right customers. Internal communications might make sure everyone on your team echoes what you tell outside stakeholders.
You aren’t choosing the medium to decide the strategy.
The market is the strategy.
The medium determines how you connect with them.
Before picking a tactic, you need to know a few things. Does the audience look somewhere specific for info, or do they trust a particular group? Are they asking certain questions before doing business? Is there a certain type of information that would give them proof? What format can help the message land fastest? Which channel seems appropriate, rather than intrusive? Finally, how can you measure success?
If you are saying, “We need to be everywhere,” please pause. Everywhere often means diluted, lacking a budget and impossible to track. So choose which tactics make sense, ensure you are being purposeful, and determine whether the channel suits the audience or only your brand’s presence.
A simple audience-finding exercise
A simple exercise for determining target audiences: Select just one purpose and communication goal. Consider who is responsible for meeting it. Then ask the following questions:
Who can directly affect this goal?
Who impacts this person? Who may try to resist?
Who is our target audience?
What are some other target audiences who currently trust us and who are the ones who should be trusting us but don’t know us yet?
What does each audience have to believe?
What do they need to be reassured that they should believe?
What questions do we need to answer to meet each audience’s needs?
Where do each of these audiences look for information?
What would you like each of them to do?
Why would proof give each audience a reason to take that action?
If you cannot answer those, do not start the communication campaign yet. You are not ready. It may sound brutal, but if you answer these questions now, you save time, save money and a few “why didn’t this work” meetings later.
What happens when you know your target audiences
So, what happens when you know the target audiences?
When you know who your target audiences are, you start to see communications become more coherent.
Your media pitches are more likely to be interesting because you know the media outlets to target and why. Your content becomes more useful because it answers actual questions.
Your social media becomes more focused because you are not chasing every trend.
Your website is easier to navigate because you are designing it with your buyer journey in mind, not an organizational structure. The executives are more confident as spokespersons because they know exactly who they are speaking with. Your measurement becomes more accurate because you measure behavior against the goal for each audience separately. In short, it sounds like it is communicating to an actual audience. This is how trust starts.
The takeaway for your strategy for communications
The process of determining the target audience is not just something you do once in a while and then find later in the drawer. The process should be the basis for what to say, who to say it to and where to say it, as well as the foundation of every message, press pitch, PR campaign, speech, tweet, email, newsletter, blog post, podcast and landing page for a website, as well as a news interview.
Too many companies skip it.
They think being loud equals progress.
They publish more, post more and share more, but they never know if those messages are reaching the people who will be the deciding factor for them.
When brands do the work, everything changes. They know what to say. They know who needs to hear it. They know where to show up. They know how to measure whether the work moved the needle.
The right audience gives your communications purpose. It helps you stop guessing and stop wasting money and stop filling the internet with messages that sound just like every other.
At TrizCom PR, we help clients find those audiences, craft messages that connect and develop communications strategies that support your business goals.
Every brand has a narrative. We can help tell yours.
Contact Jo Trizila and the TrizCom PR team at Jo@TrizCom.com or visit TrizCom.com to begin.
Everyone has a story. Let TrizCom PR help tell yours.
About the Author:
Jo Trizila – Founder & CEO of TrizCom PR
Jo Trizila is the founder and CEO of TrizCom PR, a leading Dallas-based public relations firm known for delivering strategic communications that drive business growth and enhance brand reputations as well as Pitch PR, a press release distribution agency. With over 25 years of experience in PR and marketing, Jo has helped countless organizations navigate complex communication challenges, ranging from crisis management to brand storytelling. Under her leadership, TrizCom PR has earned recognition for its results-driven approach, combining traditional and integrated digital strategies to deliver impactful, measurable outcomes for clients across various industries, including healthcare, technology and nonprofit sectors. Jo is passionate about helping businesses amplify their voices and connect with audiences meaningfully. Her hands-on approach and commitment to excellence have established TrizCom PR as a trusted partner for companies seeking to elevate their brand and achieve lasting success. Contact Jo at jo@TrizCom.com.