Is Audience important to online marketing?

When planning online marketing efforts, do you consider who you are trying to reach with your search advertising, email marketing or keywords? I pulled some bullets from About.com on target audience analysis and provided some of my thoughts.

  1. Who is your target audience? This can be someone loyal to your brand that could come to your website through branded searches. Look to see how they get to your site through referring traffic.
  2. Where is your target audience located? Geographic location is important to know when looking for opportunities. Has anyone in Colorado heard of your brand or used any of your products? If not, there may not be a great response from targeting that region with ad dollars or link requests. Acquiring new traffic could get expensive in new regions. Local search listings such as a Google Places company listing can help give you some insight into regional activity and searches.
  3. What do they think about your current brand? Basic social media monitoring is a good start. See what positive (or negative) comments are associated with your brand.
  4. What would you like them to think about your brand? This can be tricky. Brands are not created overnight. What qualities about your services or products make you stand apart from the rest?
  5. How will you attract them to your products or services? Online marketing, of course.
  6. Who else is competing for their loyalty and devotion? A competitive analysis is key to determining who your competitors are in the space. Once you have identified 3-5 of your online competitors in the search space, see how they match up with tools like SpyFu.
  7. Are you targeting business or consumer sectors? You will hear people say they are  no different, B2B and B2C are the same customer. What’s been your experience?