When getting a new client, agencies need to understand the ins and outs of that business, from its core values to its team members and processes to its service offering and target audience. For an agency, understanding the core audience of its customer and what drives it is usually an essential part of onboarding new clients.
Without a proper grasp of the company’s primary audience, the agency can’t hope to connect with them and promote the business’s best interests. Without in-depth knowledge of the client’s audience, an agency cannot provide real value. Luckily, there are several ways that an agency can tap into the customer base and understand their perspectives. These 16 professionals from Forbes Agency Council share their opinions of the most effective ways of doing so.
Members share how your agency can better understand a new client’s target audience.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Gather Insights From A Variety Of Sources
It’s important to gather audience insights from a variety of sources and perspectives. We utilize a proven matrix of quantitative and qualitative research combined with market analysis and “snooping” to assemble a complete picture of our clients’ target customers — one that takes into account not only traits they share directly, but also more subtle, subconscious quirks where the magic happens. – Trish Thomas, TEEM
2. Do A Communication Assessment
The best way for agencies to learn about a client’s audience is to do a communication assessment. This can include a survey to audience members, review of social media responses, and a review of how and what the client is doing to reach their audience. – Kim Plyler, Sahl Communications Inc.
3. Talk To Real Customers
Talking to real customers is key. Surveys and other sources of “data” can give you the broad strokes of trends, but there is nothing like getting on a call or grabbing a (distanced) coffee to hear about someone’s experience firsthand. With a few of those conversations, the common needs of that market will cut right through. – Paul Canetti, Bounce House
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4. Understand The Competition
Identify the target audience by understanding the competition and the consumer and what you have in common with them. Then identify what they are doing wrong and provide a solution to their problems. Highlight the need and become the answer. – Greg Carney, Freedom United Social
5. Create Customer Personas
Creating a persona can help an agency identify an ideal customer for the client. Have one-on-one meetings with your client and ask all possible questions to better understand their targeted audience, region, and marketing goals. Based on all of this information, we plan campaigns across multiple channels. – Mandeep Singh, SEO Discovery Pvt Ltd.
6. Define Their Ideal Customer
Discovering and defining ideal customers for a brand or company proposition is crucial. To achieve this, purchaser patterns should be identified, followers analyzed, passionate loyalists summarized and social media scrutinized. Chasing the wrong customers is not only costly, it can alienate members of the core audience. – Dave Wendland, Hamacher Resource Group
7. Leverage Ethnography Studies
We employ ethnography studies to determine how a consumer shops or consumes the brand, and these studies can offer very powerful data and insights. This involves spending time in a retail store, bar/restaurant or mall and watching consumers make choices in these environments. This research can then be combined with other data to build a complete picture of the consumer and how they engage with the brand. – Kim Lawton, Enthuse Marketing
8. Cast Yourself As An Anthropologist
Especially now that so much human interaction and conversation have been driven online, diving into your brand’s social media profile is a great starting point for checking out the conversation but also your competitors. Reddit and Twitter are especially valuable tools where you can find users participating in conversations about your brand and related topics. – Russ Williams, Archer Malmo
9. Go Straight To The Data
Many times, a company’s target audience may vary between channels, so it’s important to do your own digging. Most businesses today have some sort of digital footprint where you can see historical analytics, past ad campaigns and user behavior. We look at which users are actually converting at the end of the day and emulate that audience for future targeting. – Danny Shepherd, Titan Growth
10. Sit With The Client’s Internal Data Team
The easiest way is to sit with your client’s internal data teams rather than simply requesting information. It enables you to extract more useful data, and any nuances or internal assumptions will also become apparent. However, an audience is only relevant if you can target them, so it needs to be defined in a way that allows conversion to an actionable buying audience. – Christopher O’Keefe, Match & Wood
11. Have In-Depth Interviews With Stakeholders
In-depth interviews with internal stakeholders to understand the client’s value proposition and goals enable us to more fully understand the most appropriate audience. Mapping this audience helps us understand preferred content streams and channel engagement. Often, a client doesn’t fully understand their target audience — this exercise helps us get it right and understand how to reach them. – Megan Humphreys, Convé Communications
12. Send Out A Survey To Their Database
Send out a survey to their existing database to gather the kinds of information you are looking to learn. Great things happen to those who ask, and this can be used as a way to gather additional data to make better marketing decisions, while at the same time as a way to offer a promotion to anyone who participates. – Bryan Citrin, Chiropractic Advertising
13. Understand The ‘Why,’ Not Just The ‘Who’
Knowing a client’s target audience is simple yet complex. The most successful brands understand why their customers choose them, as well as why some customers choose their competitors. That’s the core of our approach. Getting to understand the “why,” not just the “who.” This requires an understanding of the client’s research and third-party category research and conducting specific original research. – Jason Cieslak, Siegel+Gale
14. Ask To Shadow A Sales Call
We’ve seen great success when we can listen in or listen to a recording of a sales call to understand the types of questions their target audience have and how those questions are answered by their sales team. This helps come up with the best content ideas! – Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.
15. Use Google Analytics
I use Google Analytics — more specifically, the “Interests” function — to get information for every new client I bring on board. Leveraging Google’s data gives me factual insight into what demographics, geographic locations, devices and, most importantly, interest data that their previous visitors were interested in. This allows me to follow the data of past visitors vs. guessing and possibly being wrong. – Victor Smushkevich, Smart Street Media
16. Understand Consumers’ Emotional Triggers
While data points can highlight consumer preferences, understanding consumers’ emotional triggers is key in drafting a strategy that creates connections and leads to client acquisition. With virtual meetings being widely accepted, video focus groups are very effective in understanding what’s happening between the data. – Carey Kirkpatrick, CKP
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
