Audience Understanding

Understanding your audience is a force multiplier.

With a strategic understanding of your audience every piece of content, every new feature, every marketing email becomes more powerful, more effective, and more scalable.

Beyond one-size-fits-all.

Moving beyond "one size fits all" sales and marketing is challenging—and crucial.

You produce better outcomes faster when working with a solid understanding of your audience. Understanding your audience helps you know what to create, where to focus, and how to prioritize.

Don't spin your wheels.

If you don't have a practical understanding of your customer, then you are leaving your execution to hope.

If you're fortunate, you will chance upon some decent outcomes, but it will take more time, more resources, and more false starts. Creating strategic, practical customer understanding is difficult. Most organizations struggle to develop and leverage a practical understanding of their audiences.

Diagnosing an audience problem.

Audience understanding problems are difficult to recognize because they manifest as performance problems but don’t respond to normal optimization techniques. There are lots of names for audience tools—for now let’s call them personas. The more of these signs your organization exhibits when working with personas, the more critical your audience understanding problem is:

  • You struggle to write compelling, effective marketing content.

  • A single person created your personas.

  • You’re not sure what to do with video.

  • Win/loss or after-action reports don't include your personas.

  • You have no documented personas, or they are collecting dust in a shared folder.

  • The team refers to personas mostly to support their position in an argument.

  • You can't agree on the prioritization of new ideas.

  • Every piece of content you create looks the same.

  • You sell primarily on features.

  • You don't conduct regular customer interviews.

  • The only way to identify a persona within your CRM—if you can at all—is with the Persona field.

  • Your personas are mostly demographic.

  • Reports don't breakdown performance by persona.

  • The sales team cannot identify which persona would represent a given prospect.

  • Automated touchpoints send the same content to all the names within a line of business.

  • You don't segment NPS results.

  • Your ads are boring.

  • Use of stock imagery has reached embarrassing levels.

Solving for audience understanding

“We’ve tried creating some personas but aren’t sure we hit the mark and don’t know where to go next.”

Persona Assessment

Assessment of your personas across 20 criteria with specific recommendations for improvement and application of personas in your situation.

“We have some ideas around our audiences and also have lots of customer data at our fingertips. We want to go deep.”

1 Week Audience Sprint

A week-long deep dive into rigorous audience development. A sprint is five half-day working sessions and includes research, persona development, prioritization, validation, and content or feature planning exercises.

This is a challenging process and not recommended for all organizations.

“We know we need help with our personas but we also need a lot of help driving execution.”

Fractional Leadership

Audience development is the foundation of both Fractional CMO and Fractional Product engagements.