[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

“How do I reach more of my target audience?”
This is a question I’m often asked.

Creating goal-breaking ads and reaching your perfect audience are NOT the result of using any special ‘ninja’ targeting strategies.

It *surprise, surprise* all comes down to using a process and following a system that leads to you truly understanding the audience you’re trying to attract.

What are their biggest struggles?
Where do they feel pressure?
Who do they look up to?

So, in this episode I’m detailing the importance of understanding your audience on a deeper level (+ the strategy this requires!).

I’ll walk you through my two most powerful methods so you can start targeting your ideal audience, today!

Listen, take notes, and then SHARE with your best-business-friends! (Tag @emilyhirsh for a quick shoutout in stories!)

And if you want access to reports like this from a Team who knows their stuff, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!

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Emily Hirsh: 

Hello, my friends. How is everybody doing? I hope you’re all having a fabulous week. I’ve had a very productive and busy week. I’ve been on so many calls, which I don’t actually love because I don’t get like actual focus, deep work done, but I’ve been working on my interviews or, um, ignite students to hone in our messaging and that’s been great and just some really good team calls and brainstorming sessions. So, super excited on all fronts over here. And finally, my little one William, he’s almost four months and he’s finally like, kind of good with our nanny. My kids like never want to be with a nanny the first three months, which is fine. But once they get about three months old, it’s really hard to still have him while I’m working. So I’m in that like middle period where I’m still getting interrupted to go feed him or help get him down for his nap, but super grateful that I get to work from home and be right here anytime he needs me, but also super grateful for some of my own time again, because it’s been, since he was born, that I’ve actually had a little bit of that. I still can’t really go to the coffee shop and work that much because I worry about him getting upset while I’m gone. And I like to just be right here. Maybe I’m too much, but we do a lot of attachment parenting, especially in the first year. And it’s worked really well for other kids and feels the best for me. 

So anyways, today what I want to talk about is answering the question, how do I reach more of my target audience? This was a recent question I got. And not just one time I get this question a lot. And I think that, it’s sometimes perceived as maybe like a secret Ninja strategy that you need to reach your perfect audience and it’s not it, you know, surprise, surprise comes down to more of a process and a system and kind of following that and it will work.

And so I want to walk through that with you guys, so you can reflect on if there are action items you should be taking to reach more of your target audience. So, the first and most important thing that you can possibly do to reach your target audience is have clarity around who they are. And I don’t just mean like, “Oh, it’s moms, or it’s six figure business owners, or it’s software business owners” or whatever, like a generalized statement of who it is, but a deep, deep understanding of who it is that you’re trying to reach. You’ll hear me say this in so many podcast episodes and so much content that your messaging is more important than almost anything else you’ll do because how you speak and connect and create content and write emails and write your ads all plays into your messaging and how much you understand the person that you’re trying to attract.

So the first most important thing is that you have clarity over who that target audience is. So when you ask the question, how can I reach more of my target audience? My first question is, do you know who they are on a deep level, do you know who your target audience is in a way that you could connect with them through compelling ad copy or videos or podcast episodes that you know would get people excited, it would get people building trust with you. It would get people to click whatever the goal is. You have to have that first. That means understanding what is their biggest struggle? What would they want right now today to make progress? What is their biggest frustration? What is their biggest fear? Where do they feel? Pressure? Who do they follow? What do they like? 

Like those are all questions I’ve been asking in my avatar interviews with my students. And it’s really powerful because they’re giving me answers that I wouldn’t have come up with myself without listening to my target audience and really understanding them. So the first way that you can reach more of your target audiences to understand who your target audience is, and to really truly know that on a deep, deep level so that you can then create successful marketing. And then there’s really two main ways that you reach your target audience. And then a way that you compare is it working. So the two ways you reach your target audience is through targeting and through messaging. So how do I reach more of my target audience? Let’s start with targeting. How you reach more of your target audience is: testing targeting that you think is going to reach them. And that the most accurate way is page likes. So if you have no data, you’re starting with your ads and you don’t have the ability to create lookalike audiences or use Facebook’s Intel that it’s gathered in your own marketing. The most accurate way to do it is by putting in pages that your ideal customer might like. 

So if they follow an influencer, if they follow a magazine, if they follow a company, like what are those? And put those in. And really try to go outside the box. I mean, even go to some profiles of people who are your target audience and look at who they follow or go into your audience insights in ads manager. And if you put in like Marie Forleo in your audience insights, it’ll show you more pages that people who like Marie Forleo like. And you can come up with some page ideas. And then, I mean, if you’re new, you’re going to start to figure out what out of those options that you’ve come up with, what works and what doesn’t work. And you’re going to start to hone it in and figure out, okay, well, this page works in my targeting this page doesn’t. 

So with your targeting, that’s that’s, if your new page likes are the best place to start, you know, what are interests that people have your target audience, that they follow, that you can put in for your targeting. Then if you’ve got data, what you can do is use that data to learn from it. So let’s say you have run some ads and you’ve got, you’ve grown your email list, or you’ve gotten people to a landing page, and you’ve got an audience of people who have all been to that one page. You can, one create a lookalike audience of those. So you can tell Facebook here is an audience of a thousand people. I want to find a million more people just like this. This is the most powerful audience, because the amount of data Facebook audits users is insane. Like, and it’s improving all the time in creepy ways.

They know what websites you’re visiting and what you say. Like it’s kind of ridiculous, but for us marketers, it’s extremely powerful. And the way you get access to that data is by leveraging Facebook’s data. So when you create, when you have an audience of people that you’re like here is a thousand email addresses, or a thousand people who have visited my landing page or a thousand people who have watched 25% of my video. And then you tell Facebook, make me an audience of one or 2 million more people just like this. It’s almost always, I’m not going to say always, but almost always going to be a higher converting audience because Facebook’s data is better than what you can come up with yourself, typically. If that base audience is a value, though, that’s the important piece. If you have an audience of a thousand people who visited a landing page, but they’re not your ideal audience, then obviously a lookalike audience won’t work cause you’re pulling from a poor base audience. If that makes sense.

So with your targeting, you can get more clarity and start testing. How do I reach my ideal audience? Do I come up with some more interest options? Do I strategically use lookalike audiences? How do I kind of expand my net to reach more of my target audience by thinking about that targeting? Okay. The second way that you reach your target audience better is through messaging. So let’s say you have an audience that you’re trying to follow of people who like a Grant Cardone. I don’t really like him, but I’m just, that was the first thing that came to my head. Okay. But everybody who follows grant Cardone is obviously not your audience. Otherwise you didn’t do enough work and clarity around who your audience is, you should be, you know, specific and have specific people, but they might follow Grant Cardone and his followers might be your audience.

Now, the way you narrow it down, even more to make sure you’re reaching your target audience is through messaging. By being very specific, who your content, your webinar ad, your opt in, add your product, whatever it is is for. So that it can narrow it down even more and call out those people in your ad. For example, I recently did a webinar. We work one-on-one best with people who are at six figures and above. So our webinar title was something around, “How to sell and scale your offer for six figure entrepreneurs”. Like I straight up call it out. Now the downside with that was we attracted some businesses that weren’t kind of our specialty. So, we really work best with online course creators, influencers, online eCommerce brands, somebody who is a digital product, digital service in there, right? So now the next webinar we called out, “This is for influencers online course creators.”

You know, we listed all of that out because I thought we could get more clear. And so you have to remember that you’re, you’re kind of casting this net of people that maybe follow this page or even in a lookalike audience, but a hundred percent of them are not going to be your ideal audience. So the way you hone in even more to reach more of your target audience is through your messaging and through the actual copy that you use and the way that you attract them and tell people who it’s for in a strategic way. I mean, you can be like me and directly call it out. This is for figure entrepreneurs. You can tell a story that, you know, your audience would relate to in your ad copy. That always works really well storytelling, but your messaging can call out and your messaging in the ad copy, but also like your webinar title or your opt in title or what you’re offering like should attract your ideal customer and your ideal avatar.

So, that is, that’s the second thing out of targeting and messaging. And those are the ways that you can get more clarity around targeting your ideal avatar and finding them. So it starts with targeting, and then within that targeting, you’ve got messaging. And you will call out those people so that it can get more clear. And then, after you’ve done that. So after you have clarity around who they are after, you’ve got your targeting in place after you have your messaging in place, and you feel like you’ve gotten specific and you can probably almost always improve on those things to get more clarity. Like for example, we ran that webinar where we called out six figure entrepreneurs, then we evaluated it and we’re like, well, we got some people in who weren’t really the right business owners. So how do I improve that?

So you’re always looking back at your targeting and your messaging and seeing really how can I get more specific? That’s kind of the key. How do I get more specific? How do I repel who I don’t want and attract who I do want within my targeting and my messaging. And those are the two controls that you kind of have over this. And then the last thing is, you review your data. Which is kind of what I was talking about, but you review your data and you start looking at, you know, what audiences worked in attracting your ideal customer, what audiences didn’t work. You know, if you did a webinar, you know what messaging attracted them? What did you feel like brought in the right person and what didn’t and how do I get more specific? And you look at data and you just keep doing that so that you can get more specific and granular and figure out what is working and what isn’t working.

This is why focusing, I say this so often, but focusing on one funnel is so valuable because there’s so many small tweaks and things we can do to one funnel like testing a different webinar title, testing different webinars, bullets on a landing page, testing different webinar copy shifting the messaging and how you call people out, changing your targeting. Like there’s so much you can test within one funnel that you have so much room for small tweaking and improvements that make a really big difference. And you should really be constantly looking at this. But I feel like I got this question which was, “How do I reach more of my target audience?” And this person was kind of expecting an answer of like this Ninja trick. Like, “You go on Facebook, you do this and it’ll tell you all the pages your target audience likes” or something like some sort of “Ninja move” that you could take.

And that’s not the reality. Like it’s a combination of all of these things that contribute to reaching your target audience successfully. But going back, the number one thing you have to do before you can reach your target audience is know who they are on a deep level, their struggles, their frustrations, their wins, who they follow, like all of those things, you can’t reach your target audience. If your definition of your target audience is like two words, moms who have kids, or of course moms of kids who are two like moms all have kids. But if your, if your definition of your target audience is really broad and you don’t know them on a deeper level, then you’re going to leave so many gaps in your targeting and your messaging that you’re gonna have a hard time reaching them. And you’re going to feel frustrated and like you’re not reaching them, or you’re only reaching them a small percentage of time and they’re not quality enough.

So that is how you reach more of your target audience. And I hope that was helpful for you guys. So focus on the clarity around your messaging and your targeting, and really looking at, how you can improve that and get more specific. That’s the keyword here? How do I get more specific and repel the people who are not my target audience and attract the ones who are, because if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re actually speaking to no one. That’s an important thing to remember. Thanks so much for listening today guys. If you want support with your marketing, we have only a couple spots for the rest of this quarter, literally right now on our roster. So if you’re thinking about it, honestly at all in 2020, you should see if you qualify to work with us, both in our done with you or done for you options. And you can see if you qualify by going to helpmystrategy.com and I’ll see you all on the next episode.