How to get your target audience’s interest

In last week’s blog, I wrote about how the many ways to increase brand awareness among your target audience.

This week I’m going to take that a step further by talking about how to get their interest.

The reason is that getting their attention, one of the things you do to increase awareness, and interest are the first two steps in the AIDA model of advertising. The final two are desire and action. I’ll cover them over the next two blogs.

So, you’ve used one or more of the many ways I listed to get their attention in order to increase awareness. What are you going to do now to nudge them along the road to buying from you or taking whatever action is your goal?

Interest

The answer is you have to get their interest.

But you’ve done that already haven’t you? No, rather like tooting your car horn at someone, you have them focussing on you, but you haven’t yet go them intellectually or, more importantly, emotionally engaged yet. That’s what you need to have them go further on your planned path to what you want them to do.

To get anyone interested, you first need to know what they want. It’s the first part of the short definition of marketing – “Find out what people want and give it to them at a profit.”

So you need to do or find research into what your target audience wants in life or just the area you’re operating in.

Stakeholder management

In PR, this would be part of a stakeholder management programme – once you map out who your stakeholders are and prioritise them, you engage with them to find out what they want, how you can work together for mutual benefit to both achieve your goals and how knowing this you can take actions to have them be as you would like them to be i.e. not opposing a project you have planned.

Alternatively, you can ask a third-party, like a market research company, to conduct qualitative market research to tell you what they want. Or speak to groups or people who know this group well and can tell you.

Once you have a thorough appreciation of what your target audience want, you need to identify how what you offer, plan or do is relevant to them and their goals.

Relevance

You can then use one or more forms of communicating with them to demonstrate the relevance, practically or emotionally, of what you do or offer to them.

So look at your product or service benefits and how they fit into the desired lifestyle of your target audience. How can you help them achieve their wishes?

You will then have a set of messages you can communicate to them using any of the many paid, earned, shared or owned means of promotion e.g. advertising, PR, social media or blogs.

A good way to get the interest of individuals is using ‘social proof’ – the psychological fact that most of us are more willing to try something new if we see that someone like us, or liked by us, is using and liking it.

Reviews, recommendations and introductions from trusted contacts can do this well. This can be communicated via many tools, including PR.

Want to know more? Get in touch!