Know Who You're Talking To: The Skill That Makes or Breaks Your Marketing

Most People Don't Care About Your Product

There's a saying in marketing that I want you to burn into your brain: the worst advertising campaigns would sell like crazy to the correct audiences, and the best advertising campaigns, the most incredible content, will go broke selling to the wrong audiences. So you've got to know who you're talking to.

Here's a fact. Most people out there are not interested in your products or services. They're just not. So understanding who your audience is, so you can target them, is going to either make or break your marketing success. This subject is senior in importance in the game of marketing. If you understand your audience, your probabilities of success are much, much higher.

Think about the scale for a second. There are somewhere around eight billion people on the planet. About half of them have access to the internet. In the United States there are somewhere around 200 million people actively on social media every day. You can pretty much guarantee that 80 percent of every single person you have ever known in your life is actively using one of these platforms. The probabilities are on your side that you can reach them. The question is whether you reach the right ones.

The Five Elements of Every Audience

An audience is always going to have age, gender, income level, location, and education. You have to understand these elements very clearly before you spend a dollar.

Some businesses can cover a wide array of audiences. Take weight loss. You might have a 15 year old girl looking for weight loss support, and at the same time a 64 year old male who feels he could lose some weight. It's dramatically varied, and you can run campaigns for all of them. Take it from somebody that has built a nine figure a year supplement weight loss brand internationally. But even there, the data matters: about 80 percent of the audience we service is female. The females are generally the ones concerned with weight loss, even for their husbands. So we target the females when it comes to grabbing attention.

Income level is a massive one. A 20 dollar beauty cream on Amazon is not a La Mer cream that sells for 300 dollars for two ounces. Some people buy the 300 dollar cream instead of the 10 dollar one, and you cannot target everybody the same way. In my own case, when I'm looking for clients for the marketing agency, I want to exclude the bottom 75 percent of earners in the United States, because they generally are not business owners and they cannot afford my services. I cannot help people who can't pay what we require.

Location is essential too, especially for brick and mortar businesses. If you market in cities where you cannot deliver services, you are burning that cash. And here's something you might not know: platforms like Meta let you target people based on the average income of a zip code, using IRS data that is public information. Selling a 500 dollar fitness machine? Exclude the bottom 50 percent of income earners by zip code.

Interest: The Superpower TV Never Had

Interest targeting is the one element that was never available on the old school traditional advertising path. You could not run a campaign on television knowing exactly what people were interested in. On social media, you can.

How do Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok know this? Because you and I are engaging on these platforms every day. When we interact with a page about dogs and pets, when we comment, engage, and share, that data accumulates. Something called a digital footprint is created. And all of that data is available to you when you're paying your advertising dollars to Meta, TikTok, and Google to put your message in front of the world.

This is why figuring out your avatar, your ideal customer, matters. But I'd ask you to go a little broader than the classic single avatar exercise. Instead of saying 'this is a 37 year old in San Diego with a bachelor's degree,' figure out your ranges. In my organization, my range is roughly 35 to 60 years old, male and female, making around 100,000 dollars a year or more in household income, ideally business owners, in the United States and other first world countries like Canada, the UK, and New Zealand. And they're interested in the game of business, following profiles that educate them on marketing. I want that laid out clearly before I do absolutely anything.

Spy on the Ads That Target You

Here's a free research tool you're already carrying in your pocket. Scroll your own Facebook feed. Every several posts you'll see something marked 'sponsored.' Click the three dots and then 'Why am I seeing this ad?' I have an obsession with clicking that button.

Facebook will tell you exactly why that paid message landed in front of you: the audience the advertiser chose, and your own activity. When I clicked on one of my own ads promoting my book, it showed that I target people who may have been on a hash list I uploaded. Hashing means you give Meta a list of your customers, a middleman matches it against their database, and they tell you how many matched. Facebook never sees the raw emails or phone numbers.

Then I scrolled further and hit an ad from a marketer claiming social media marketing agencies are dead. Wait a second, I am not dead, I just had a record breaking year in my agency. But it grabbed my attention, so I clicked through. His targeting: age 18 and older, United States, plus my activity, because I've shown interest in the game of marketing. He trusted Facebook to find people like me, and Facebook was correct. Do this experiment a little bit every day and you'll understand exactly how the brands you admire are targeting you, and how you can target people the same way.

Use AI to Go Deeper, Faster

In today's modern world there's a thing called artificial intelligence, and if you're not using it for audience research, you're missing out. It allows you to go deeper, faster.

Here's how I use it. Say I want to build a fitness brand for young people who own home gyms. I tell the AI exactly what I believe: they're 25 to 39, male and female, making 70,000 dollars a year or more, probably single, with resources to buy equipment. Then I ask for more detail on who my potential audience is and which social platforms they actively use. The more detail you give these tools, the better the communication you get back.

It came back with gold: professionals and entrepreneurs in their prime career years, health conscious, willing to invest in premium fitness products, predominantly single, which implies more disposable income. Then it broke down the platforms, Instagram first because it's highly visual and perfect for fitness transformations, then YouTube, TikTok, and the rest.

That's your starting point, not your finish line. You take all of that to Meta, TikTok, and Google and tell them who you want to communicate to. As powerful as these platforms are, they need to be communicated to correctly to help you find your audience. Do the homework first. Skip it, and even the best campaign in the world will go broke.