Principle 1. Know exactly who your audience is and look at everything from that group's point of view.
Marketers are consumer focused, so you should be, too. It is crucial that you understand who your target audience is and then look at the world from their point of view. You have to have an intimate understanding of the people you are trying to reach in order to motivate them to take action.
Before you can understand your audience, you need to pinpoint who they are. The idea is to break the audience into smaller groups and then target your strategy to each group based on their commonalities. This strategy is called segmentation. Different people respond to different messages, so you should be as specific as possible when you identify your target segments.
After you have identified and segmented your audience, you need to determine how best to reach each group. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What does my audience want?
- What do they care about?
- What do they dislike?
Only after you find the answers to these questions will you be able to speak to your audience and have them listen and respond. Once you have clearly defined your audience, you must tailor your message to speak to them.
To begin using these principles in the real world, break down the behavior you want to change to understand what is behind it. Only then can you think about how you might change it.