Value, Audience, & Goals: Why You Should Start Here
We often find small businesses and startups come to us asking how they can improve their marketing, and their initial questions are something like “Should I be using Instagram?” or “How can I improve my email campaigns?” or “How do we drive more traffic to our website?” But these are really tactical questions that can only be answered with an understanding of your broader marketing strategy. As a result, we typically respond with the following three questions:
How do you define your brand and what is the unique value your company provides?
What do you know about your audience and what matters to them?
What are your marketing goals?
Ultimately these three foundational questions should drive your marketing strategy, and the tactical answers will flow from there. We get why many entrepreneurial leaders jump ahead to tactics. When you’re running a business with a small team it can be hard to step out of the day to day to look at the big picture. You may know you need a clear value proposition, target audience, and goals, but setting time aside for planning and foundation-building seems like a luxury. The problem is, if you skip this investment in planning, you’re likely to make unnecessary mistakes in your execution or not really understand why you hit roadblocks. How will you know where you fell short if your intentions were never clearly defined or tested?
Having a deep understanding of your value as a brand, who is in your community, and why they’re interested in your product or service will save you a great deal of headache and dollars spent. These elements should matter deeply not only to your marketing strategy but also to your business strategy as a whole.
So what do we mean when we talk about value proposition, target audience, and goals?
Your value proposition explains why your audience should invest in your company - their time, their money, and their attention. It may include 1) elements of your brand identity - how you plan to show up for customers, what customers should expect to see and experience; 2) the benefit your product or service provides to customers; and 3) how that benefit is different from other options available. Your value proposition may evolve over time, and it may be slightly different for different audience segments, but it should be unique to your business and clearly drive your messaging and positioning in the marketplace.
Your target audience is who you plan to serve. It may be defined by age, location, industry, income, or lifestyle and ideals. It may include multiple segments. In most cases, the more specific you can get, the better. Knowing your audience tells you how you should communicate, what you should say, and where you should say it. To that end, it’s not enough to just know who you are talking to, but also what they care about and where they find their information.
Goal setting might seem easy enough. Most likely you want to increase sales, grow your revenue, and/or improve the efficiency of your marketing spend. But the most successful companies we’ve worked with go a level deeper and make a bet on the best path to reach that bottom line impact. This might mean expanding your audience, improving lead generation, or driving more online sales rather than retail. The best marketing strategies focus on moving the needle on just one or two primary goals at a time.
Why is it so important to figure out your value, audience, and goals before launching into tactics?
You must know who you are talking to and why before you can figure out where and how to communicate. It might seem obvious - you interact with your customers on a daily basis and you know your product or service inside and out. So you probably already have a broad understanding of your audience, your value, and where you want to take your business. But how often do you actually talk to your customers about their engagement with you? How much do you know about their lives outside of their interaction with your company? Do you know their motivations for buying and where they gather information about what to buy? I’m not suggesting every small business or startup should dive into thousands of dollars of market research, but I do think some basic inquiry into your audience can help almost any business.
The brand intention you set, your value proposition, and your messaging should all speak directly to this audience and what you know about them. And I promise you, your audience is not everyone. So every marketing channel will not work for your company. When you test content and tactics, you also want to ensure you are testing them on the right audience, so it is important to build social media followings, email lists, and web traffic with a target audience in mind.
It’s also critical to identify what is truly unique about your company before you can figure out how to communicate it. If your value is hard to communicate succinctly, social media ads probably aren’t going to work for you. If it’s easier to communicate in images than words, then you may need to invest in some design support. If your value differs based on the audience segment you serve, then you may need to tailor unique messages for different audiences and utilize different marketing channels depending on the audience. Understanding your audience and value will also help you decide where to purchase ads, how to target those ads, and what the calls to action should be - so ultimately you will spend dollars more efficiently.
Keep in mind, your value is more than just what you are selling. It’s why you’re selling it and why your audience should care. Especially for smaller businesses, it’s about the brand and company values behind the product or service. What do you stand for as a company and why might that continue a customer to buy from you rather than some larger company out there? Again, you don’t have to invest a ton of time and money into competitive research, but dedicating some focused time to improving your understanding of value will be a huge asset to your marketing effort.
Similarly, having clearly defined goals will tell you which marketing channels and tactics will be most effective for you. Certain channels provide more benefit for brand awareness and brand storytelling while others support action and conversion. Metrics like follower growth may be important if you’re striving for brand awareness, but they may simply be vanity metrics if what you’re really focused on is engagement or sales. All of your marketing efforts - your messaging, your channel strategy, your ad campaigns, your resource investment, and more - should roll up to one of your primary goals.
How do you go about defining your value, audience, and goals?
Start with the individual people closest to you - your team, your best customers, your partners. Schedule informal conversations, or consider setting up structured interviews and focus groups. You could even send out a survey if you have a wider set of existing or potential customers. Ask for their impression of your company, their experience with your products and services, and the unique value you provide in the community or marketplace.
A competitive landscape review can also be a relatively quick and informative process. Check out the websites, social media pages, and emails of other companies in your space (or even an adjacent space) to see how they are positioning themselves and what channels they are using. What messages are they using and where? Who do they seem to be targeting? What is the look and feel of their content?
Spend some time setting your goals. Think about all the levers you have to pull and where you think you can really make the biggest difference. Consider your capacity and also what you can achieve with your unique skill set. Determine whether you can add expertise or capacity by outsourcing. From there, develop goals that are specific, achievable, and realistic. And make sure you have a clear time frame and set of metrics to determine whether you’re successful.
Finally, test and refine your strategy. Does your target audience actually connect with the value proposition you’ve identified? You can test this through surveys and focus groups or you can test through social media messaging, web copy, advertising, or any other marketing channels that reach your target audience. Revisit your strategy and goals on a regular basis so you can make thoughtful, informed revisions as needed.
We start with value, audience, and goals with nearly all of our clients, because figuring these areas out first can save you so much time and energy in the long run. At the very least it will help you set a plan for your marketing strategy and figure out exactly what you’re testing and why. Too often we see companies try lots of different marketing approaches and not understand why they were successful or not. With a clear understanding of your value, audience, and goals, you’ll be able to form better hypotheses about what you are testing and then better understand the outcomes.
We started here with our own business, and we can assure you it is sometimes a messy and challenging process to drill down to specific answers in each of these areas. And it’s very likely your understanding of these areas will evolve over time. But the work is worth it, and it is where you will ultimately find growth and sustainability in your business.
