Today, Andy talks about two important, and often overlooked elements of audience analysis: pains and motives.
Whenever you’re dealing with understanding your audience, one of the most important things for me, that they typically teach sales people, is to look for pains that your target audience is having. So you want to talk about what problems they’re facing, what pains are they having in their daily business that you can help solve.
When you’re doing audience analysis and understanding who your target groups are, you should really be doing a pain analysis along with that – of understanding, for each of the different targets you’re focusing on, whether it be industry, level of company, or whatever it might be – that you understand what their pains are, what are the problems they’re facing in their job, what things are they trying to solve, what are they staying up at night thinking about, and how are you going to market your solution to solve those problems. So when you’re sitting down and thinking about your marketing, one of the columns you definitely want to fill out is “what pains are they experiencing?”
The second thing is motives. I think this is really important. When you’re doing your marketing and you’re creating different campaigns, what is your target market’s motivation? Especially if you’re looking at different levels in an organization. So if you’re looking at a mid-tier manager, their motive is most likely going to be somewhat impressing their boss, meeting certain KPIs, or similar. If you’re dealing with CEOs, typically their motives are going to be a little different. They’re not really there to impress anyone, unless they’re a big enough company to have a board, but you want to think about their motives which are probably strategic growth and how they can delegate different pieces. So think about whats going to motivate that decision and other decisions in their daily jobs.
So definitely, when you’re looking at marketing and you’re looking at your audience and analyzing these pieces, two important elements are definitely understanding the pains of your audience and understanding the motives that they have.