To future-proof and scale your business, you must move from a product-first to an audience-first strategy.
What does that mean in practice? And how can you create this shift in your marketing?
I’ll show you exactly what being audience-oriented means and then walk you through the same 5-step method that I use for all my businesses.
What does an audience-first strategy mean in marketing and business?
An audience-first strategy means putting your target customers at the core of your marketing and business, listening to them and getting their input to understand their problems, needs, preferences, and goals.
That way, you can offer them a tailored and valuable experience, content, and products.
It’s the opposite of a product-first approach: creating what you think your audience wants and planning your marketing around that.
A product-first approach used to be the norm but just doesn’t work anymore:
- When you rely on assumptions, you could spend months and even thousands of pounds creating a product nobody wants or a marketing “strategy” no one engages with
- Everyone’s competing for your audience’s attention online. You can’t expect to get it (and retain it) by just talking about your products! You must make your marketing relevant to them
Benefits of using an audience-first approach
If you’re used to starting from your product and brand, it can feel scary to put the ego aside and your audience first. But there’s a simple reason why I’ve been doing that with all my businesses: it works.
An audience-first approach brings you lots of benefits, like:
- Relying on data instead of guesswork – Listening to your customers means you can base your strategy on data and insights, NOT assumptions
- Increased engagement and brand awareness – Nowadays, over 7 in 10 customers ONLY engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests
- Enhanced reputation – Your target audience will appreciate how you keep giving them value and listening to them. This will help you reach more people, improve their perception of your brand, and make you stand out as a trusted authority
- Higher conversion rates – When you start from your audience (and their problems, needs, preferences, and goals), it’s easier to engage them and turn them into customers. Much better than an impersonal “This is my product: buy it now” approach!
- Brand loyalty – Retaining customers is 6-7 times cheaper than acquiring new ones. With an audience-first approach, you can keep nurturing them with personalised messages, get feedback after a purchase, and upsell or cross-sell the best products for them
- Better ROI and revenue – When you plan your marketing around what your audience wants and needs, it becomes more targeted and effective. So, you’ll sell more (without burning money on random strategies or guesswork)
Implement an audience-first strategy in your marketing in 5 steps
Now that you know how an audience-oriented approach will benefit your business, let’s see exactly how you can adopt it.
1. Conduct audience research
By now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it all starts with your audience and what they care about.
So, the first step is uncovering exactly who they are and, especially, their problems, needs, preferences, and goals. How?
- Scorecard or assessment tools – Entice more people to answer your market research questions with an engaging quiz. You’ll wow your ideal customers with valuable results while collecting plenty of data (for example, a web designer could create an “Is Your Website Costing You Business?” quiz)
- Surveys – Ask strategic questions in a varied range of formats (like yes/no, rating scales, and open-text boxes). With ScoreApp, you can keep your audience engaged with a more compelling and attractive quiz-style survey. If you need to ask lots of questions, you might want to motivate your participants with a gifted survey, including incentives like discounts or freebies
- Interviews – Use a ScoreApp quiz to identify your ideal customers, and only arrange 1:1 interviews (in-person or online) with those who fit the bill
- Discussion groups – After pre-qualifying them with a quiz, bring your target customers into the same room or video call, so that you can ask them questions and analyse their interactions
- Social media monitoring – Keep a close eye on what type of content your audience engages with the most, and read their comments and DMs to identify relevant patterns
- Waitlists – Instead of dropping a new offer out of the blue (risky!), attach a ScoreApp quiz to a waitlist to test your idea first. By understanding exactly how to improve it (if needed), you’ll save money on your launch and sell out
- Introduction events – Film producers organise test screenings before the official release. You can do the same with your offer or concept, either online or in person! For example, I did that for my new business, Book Magic. It gave us insights into what people were most and least interested in (and we got our first customers, too!)
2. Create detailed customer personas
I often see entrepreneurs and marketers fall into these traps:
- Mistake 1: Basing their customer personas on assumptions – You can’t create a true-to-life persona without getting input from your real customers (and that’s why we start with audience research!)
- Mistake 2: Prioritising demographics – Of course, there’s a place for them, too. But what motivates people to spend big money is solving a big problem
So, when creating your customer personas, maintain this new audience-first approach by focusing on:
- What are they struggling with?
- What have they already tried to do to solve that problem?
- Why did it not work?
- How is this problem making them feel?
- What do they care about the most?
- What are their goals, and how can you help them achieve them?
- What beliefs and misconceptions are holding them back?
- What are their preferences, likes, and dislikes?
Once you have this clear customer persona, you can plan a more relevant and effective marketing strategy.
When starting with a ScoreApp quiz, you can personalise your marketing even further and adapt it to different segments (for example, by setting up separate email sequences based on their results).
3. Develop an audience-first content strategy
For your ideal customers to buy from you or your business, they must first know, like, and trust you. So, think of your marketing as the journey they need to go on to feel a strong connection with your brand.
That’s why it’s particularly effective to start with a strategic lead magnet, like a quiz: you’ll attract more right-fit people by offering them something they want (in exchange for their contact details), and you will then get to nurture them in a personalised way.
For example, a business coach could create a “What’s Holding Your Business Back?” quiz. It’ll give some much-needed clarity to each participant and segment them into groups depending on their answers. Then, they’ll automatically receive different nurturing sequences until they’re ready to jump on a call to discuss their results.
So, your content strategy—on social media, your blog, via email, and so on—can focus on directing your audience to this valuable quiz (instead of just pushing sales). Simple and effective!
Planning your content calendar
Focus on a balanced mixture of content types, always referring to your customer persona:
- Educational – Meet your ideal customers where they are right now. As well as educating them on your industry and positioning yourself as an authority, show them what’s causing their problems and what’s possible for them (for example, “Why your Instagram carousels aren’t working & how to fix it”)
- Entertaining – Create or nurture your connection with them (for example, tell the story of when you made their same mistake)
- Promotional – Give them a clear call to action (like scheduling a call or taking your free quiz), and highlight how that next step will benefit them
4. Engage and interact with your audience
An “audience-first approach” and “one-way communication” do NOT belong to the same strategy! Instead:
- Actively engage with your target customers on social media by replying to their comments, commenting on their posts, asking questions, and interacting in the DMs
- Start or participate in relevant discussions (for example, on industry-specific pages or online groups)
- Collaborate with businesses offering complementary services to create something new and exciting for your audience, like a joint webinar or offer
5. Analyse and adapt
An audience-first approach isn’t something you adopt once and then forget about. You must keep committing to it, reviewing your results, and optimising your strategy. Otherwise, you’d be back to relying on guesswork.
Some of the tactics I use are:
- Analytics – Look at them regularly to see how your audience is interacting with your content (for example, what types of posts do they engage with on social media? Which email sequences bring you the most sales after a quiz?)
- Ask for more feedback – Run a separate quiz to get direct feedback on your marketing or after a purchase. You’ll uncover what your audience actually liked and disliked about their experience with you
- A/B testing – Show different versions of the same content piece to each group (for example, with ads and emails) to see what performs best
- Improve your strategy accordingly – Now that you know what resonates the most and the least with your audience? Double down on the former and fix the latter!
Adopt a successful audience-first approach with ScoreApp
If you want your target customers to choose YOU, you must prioritise THEM.
A ScoreApp quiz is the best way to do this across their entire journey with your brand.
Just to name a few, you can:
- Use a quiz for market research
- Create a quiz funnel that grows your audience and nurtures them in a personalised way
- Test your ideas with a waitlist quiz
- Get direct feedback from your customers
So, ditch outdated product-first strategies, and stop relying on guesswork. Adopt an audience-first approach by creating your ScoreApp quiz today and for FREE.
