How To Understand Your Audience So That You Can Build An Authentic Brand

If you don’t have any experience with building a brand, it can be a daunting task. The mistake most people do is that they’re too focused on the product.

This is also true for speakers.

The second mistake most people make when building a brand is that that they try to talk to everyone. If you’re talking to everybody you’re talking to nobody. At some point you need to decide who you want to influence. We like to feel special. If you communicate in a general tone, people will not respond to you.

This is also true for speakers.

The first step in building a brand is to know exactly who you want to communicate to. This will influence how you communicate, type of words you use and what stories you want to tell.

How To Create Your Ideal Audience Avatar

This process is based on my marketing process called Inception Marketing. If you’re familiar with Inception Marketing, you’ll recognize some of the steps.

Here are the steps:

1. Finding your Overall Target Audience (OTA)
2. Finding your Ideal Target Audience (ITA)
3. Creating your Ideal Audience Avatar (IAA)

1. Finding Your Overall Target Audience

What is the big, general category of people you want to help or influence?

Examples of OTA’s: Doctors, layers, moms, teenagers, families with children, families without children, business owners…

2. Finding Your Ideal Target Audience

Find a more specific sub-category of people within your Overall Target Audience.

Let’s say our Overall Target Market is families with children.

Examples of ITA’s:

Families with toddlers, families with teenagers, families with children living in big cities, families with children living in the countryside, families with toddlers and teenagers, families with diabetic children.

Find the one ITA you most want to influence.

3. Creating Your Ideal Audience Avatar

Create an Ideal Audience Avatar based on your ITA in the step above. Who in your ITA do you want to communicate with directly?

Let’s say your ITA is families with diabetic children. Who in the family do we want to communicate with? The mother? The father? The children in the family with diabetes, or the children without diabetes? When you have decided who in your ITA you want to communicate with, create an Ideal Audience Avatar of that person. Get as many details about this person as possible.

BONUS! We’ve created a simple workbook for you to create your Ideal Audience Avatar.

DOWNLOAD YOUR WORKBOOK NOW

Every time you write copy for your website, create content for your blog and social media, picture your Ideal Audience Avatar.

Now you maybe thinking; where do I fit in? How can I still be me?

By making an Ideal Audience Avatar, it will actually be easier to be yourself. In our daily life we communicate to either 1-to-1 or 1-to-few, whether it’s to our children, spouse, friends or co-workers.

We adapt our communication style all the time, depending on who we’re speaking to.

We speak differently to a 5 year old, than to a 15 year old. We communicate differently to a business client than to our best friend at a party. We all know that we need to adjust our communication style if we what to be an effective communicator.

When you get clarity on who you want to influence, the easier it will to be to communicate more efficiently.

It’s much easier to communicate authentically when speaking to a friend, than if you try to speak to everybody. The best speakers can capture a large audience attention, because the audience feels that the speaker is talking directly to them, even if there are 5000 people in the audience.

If each time you write copy for your website, blog, article or create content for social media, you visualize speaking to your avatar, your brand will be authentic and consistent. Your brand will feel like you.