Audience First Marketing – What That Really Means

For ages, most companies have focused on themselves; it’s all “we are the best” and “look at what we can do!”; however, that no longer works.

People have a lot of choices these days. “Audience First Marketing” is basically putting the customer first, truly thinking about what’s going to interest them and provide actual value.

Instead of blasting self-serving messages, companies should give an authentic reflection of the product or service they are selling. To sell to someone, one must first understand them.

Really Knowing Your People

It all starts with knowing your peeps. It’s a business taking time to figure out who their ideal customer really is ; so what do they like, what are they scared of, what problems do they have? It should be deeply personal. Do not make assumptions!

Instead, that information should determine the content made, the marketing to spread it, and the way that they support customers following any purchase. When these steps are skipped over, the marketing comes off as really tone deaf.

The key is, creating meaningful relationships requires an authentic human touch. It’s more than just “collecting demographic”; it’s becoming fluent in someone’s needs.

So, the next time that a plan is drawn together for a product release, start thinking more along the lines of asking “how is this going to realistically impact the audience’s life?”.

Talking Audience’s Language

Once it is determined who this company is talking to, it’ll be easier to have a conversation in their language. No one actually cares about industry buzzwords; instead, what they do care about is actual solutions crafted for them.

Instead of forcing a certain product down someone’s throat, the goal is to share a compelling story; people will be grateful and reward the business with their support from there.

Instead of making sure that everything sounds robotic and ‘professional,’ just have natural, authentic discussions, even if it sounds a little awkward.

This is where the keyword data that your company is targeting may or may not fit in — the goal is to give the user value. If there is no value, just cut it out, as it will not benefit anyone. This allows you to create content strategies that feel genuine and not salesy.

Where Does ‘Buying’ Things Fit?

Now, some marketers looking to speed things up sometimes consider shortcuts like buying followers or views. This happens a lot in the Instagram world. They don’t want to wait long to organically have more likes, followers, and views.

Services like the one you described, with options to buy Instagram likes, come to play here. Although this strategy may make it so that a lot of progress can be made in little time, that is hardly ‘audience first’ at heart. If buying followers and likes is the audience’s priority, then why does that need to even be purchased?

At its core, audience-first marketing always comes down to creating and caring for a relationship: so, make sure that you will value those relationships over anything, and you’ll always win.

Measuring What Matters Now

Forget everything that you think you know about traditional analytical methods. In that past era, all that people cared about was impressions and total clicks; it was a quantity-focused metric. Now? Things should instead be focusing on ‘engagement’.

How do visitors actually behave on the website? Focus should be placed on comment sections; what does the feedback end up telling this company?

It requires more dedication to track how an audience is affected, compared to what percentage of impressions ended in clicks. With this information, marketing will be further refined and cater to the audience.

With new engagement tracking tools, feedback is more helpful than ever. Listen, adapt, tweak things, and always strive to be better.

Always Showing Respect

The biggest disservice that someone can have in their marketing career is not having respect for their customers. By respecting their feelings, marketing can naturally evolve and make sure that no customer feels cheated or misled.

Companies will do anything to get sales. Remember that most customers do not have a dedicated personal relationship with the business, so it is easy to take advantage of them.

Be sure to listen to questions being asked and answer in a respective tone. In an era where a lot of people’s questions are resolved by chatbots, people will feel much more respected if they get fast, authentic responses that are being typed out by an actual human being.

Conclusion

Audience First Marketing requires a complete mindset shift; be authentic, talk with the audience, and measure what matters.

Marketing for people requires companies to know who cares and is always willing to cater to them. When following those guidelines, the company will gain an audience that trusts them and will always win.