Audience Targeting – Common Misconceptions To Avoid

Audience targeting is one of those success measurements that most people have heard about. However, very few really use this in their day to day business.

This is crazy, audience targeting is one of the most effective yet affordable solutions in order to market your music. So, why are not more people using it?

Well, for once, you need planning. Secondly, you need time in order to run the actual audience targeting research.

Two of the things most people shy away from. Social media platforms are also really good at selling the promise of quick and easy fan engagement and reach.

However, this is only the case when you really have an in-depth knowledge of your fans. What is more, also having an idea of the new people you want to reach.

The next thing social media platforms sell you successfully is how easy advertising is. To some extent this is true. Running ads on Facebook, for example, can be done by everyone. Also, you don’t need huge sums of investment.

Here’s the kicker: in order to make you ad campaign a success you really need who you are targeting. There you have it again, audience targeting!

Here’s how to make audience targeting work for you.

Common misconceptions about audience targeting

One of the most common misconceptions is that you do audience targeting once and then you know. This is crazy, audience targeting is an ongoing process.

Especially in digital marketing, you should never think of anything you create as permanent or done because then you lose the advantage of your platforms’ agility

*source: WordStream

Moreover, you need to factor in the algorithm most online platforms run on nowadays. No matter if you are looking at YouTube or Instagram. There is a constant battle with the algorithm.

By all means, the longer you run your content strategy the better the algorithm may pick up. This means access to more people on the platforms. Hence, you need a constant audience targeting research in order to harvest the efforts you’d put in.

Run audience targeting across all your online channels!

Another huge misconception about audience targeting is that it is enough to do this on one platform. However, people online hardly just use one. It’s more that people more enjoy a multi-channel consumption.

As an example, someone might browse the Instagram Feed and see a nice IGTV video. However, the long form of this might be on YouTube.

So you would head over there. Perhaps you recognise a nice track on the video. Now, you are heading toward Spotify in order to save it to one of your playlists.

Next, you head back to Instagram to share the playlist addition with your followers.

What does that mean? It means you need to have an eye on audience targeting across all of your channels.

Questions that might help you stay on ball:

• Are we reaching the audience we want?
• If not, who are we reaching?
• Is the intended audience responding the way we want?
• Is there a similar audience the target can help us find?
  *source: WordStream

You only need research and all will be fine?

For those people who actually are doing audience targeting research, they sometimes think that’s all. Important to realise, it is the first step without a doubt. However, you can’t just stop there.

Audience targeting only gives you the house number, now you still need to go and ring the bell! Of course, now you need the person to open to door.

What I’m trying to say is that you not only need audience targeting to know who it is you want to approach. You also need to start a conversation with them with the goal of establishing a relationship.

In the online world, we now live in flooded with so much noise, it actually can take longer to build up those relationships than doing the whole audience targeting in the beginning.

One thing you can do in order to help those relationships to form is to have strong branding. With branding, you are helping your desired fans to understand you more. The better someone thinks they know what you are about the easier it gets for them to identify themselves with you.

After all, this makes it much easier to sell your campaign story as well as keeping people interested for a longer period of time.

Research all territories for a good audience targeting analysis

It is really tempting to limit the audience targeting research to your own country or even just Europe. Again, don’t believe your fans are just like you or live in the same area.

Far from it! The beauty of the internet is simply that you can reach people all over the world. Don’t be an analysis snob and leave out certain areas just because you’ve never been there or don’t know anywhere from there.

Areas like Asia or Latin America offer huge potential for gaining new fans. Just look at Taylor Swift and how she exclusively offered her new album to a Chinese streaming service.

Make sure to run your research world wide. Also, don’t shy away from underground research of Facebook Groups and Reddit.

Here, you can really find engaged fans as much as trends that might be useful for you.

Hitting one of those sweet Trigger Cities can have an enormous effect on your career!

For doing research I need expensive software like Chartmetric

One of the excuses I hear most often is that people can’t do an audience targeting research because they can’t afford expensive software like Chartmetric or Soundcharts.

Yes, that software can really help you along and certainly speed thing up. However, having a low budget is not an excuse at all.

You can always use an Excel sheet and design your very own data analytics template! Not only is this cost-effective, but it is also a great tool for learning about data analytics.

What is more, you can easily share it with your team members. That way, all people that are working on the project are on the same page.

Here you have it, common misconceptions about audience targeting research. I understand that it can be a bit of an undertaking.

Also, if you are starting with a new project you probably just want to get started right away. Having the patience to do an audience targeting research first can be a bit daunting.

However, the better the analysis the better the strategy. And as we found out in this blog post, audience targeting is an ongoing process anyway.

The earlier you take this into your weekly work routine the better. Before you think twice you want to do audience research anyway.

Because once you’ve run an ad campaign that was powered by a strong audience targeting analysis you don’t want to go back.

Guessing your fans is never a good idea. If you know exactly who it is you are aiming it the more esteem your digital strategy will get!