You are making an impact. After having a life changing experience, a member of your community approaches you astonished that they didn’t hear about your service/product before!  If your organization can relate to this scenario, we want to help you no longer be the best kept secret.

What can you do to create awareness? Today we will help you come out of the shadows and into the light for good. Learn more about identifying the right audience to reach and refining your messages, and more ways to stop being the best kept secret.

How to Identify Your Target Audience

You’ve taken the first step already by deciding that you want to create more awareness about your organization. You’re ready to put the days of being the best kept secret behind you, and make sure your audiences know what your organization has to offer. Identifying the audience you’d like to reach is essential to creating awareness. 

Think about the person who will benefit the most from your product or service. Who are they? Where do they work, where do they live, how old are they? The demographics of your ideal audience is a key part of identifying them. Also, you need to understand how these people receive their information. Is it on social media or by reading a newspaper? 

Say you’re trying to raise awareness about resources that are available to a specific demographic of people; you’ll need to use the channels they’re most active on. For example, if your organization trying to inform electric vehicle owners about a new tax credit that they’re applicable for you may want to target media outlets that are car specific or partner with electric car brands on social media who have loyal following. These are a few ways to identify where your audience is.

Remember to ask yourself:

• Who would we like to reach? (Age, gender, occupation, etc.)
• What problems or challenges are they facing, that we can help them with? 
• Which channels are best to reach our audience? In other words, how do they consume information? 
• What, or who, do my audiences find influential? 
• What tools do we have in place to communicate with them? What tools might we need that we don’t have yet? 

Clear Communication is the Next Step

Now that you’ve identified your target audiences, it’s time to refine your messaging. The way you communicate with your audience can influence whether or not they decide to engage with your organization. This will require you to reflect internally and identify:

• If your organization’s purpose statement is up to date and clear 
• If your organization has a strong brand narrative

These aspects will help you create strong and cohesive messaging for your audience.

Timing is also key. When you are creating messaging for your audience it is important to think about where they are in their engagement journey. Your audience won’t be fully engaged right away. It is important that in the beginning you let them know that you understand their needs before you hit them with what you have to offer.

Understanding Different Media Channels

Understanding each media channel, and especially which ones matter most to your audiences, is an essential step of no longer being the best kept secret. Note: It is ok if you don’t activate each channel – in fact, it is wise to take on fewer activations, well within your capacity, and get good at them, rather than more and stretch yourself too thin to be effective. Different channels fall into four buckets:

• Paid – traditional and digital advertising like print ads, billboards, Google Ads
• Earned – media relations and contributions like feature news stories, or being included as an expert in news stories, publishing a guest opinion, or earning good reviews on Google or Facebook 
• Shared – social media channels
• Owned – content marketing like emails or blogging

As you learn more about your audience, you will understand which channels are best used to reach them. It’s important not to let yourself get overwhelmed. In today’s world it is possible to stay top of mind with your audiences at seemingly every turn, but that doesn’t mean you need to take on more than you can handle or afford. Instead, think about meeting your target audience where they’re at and building relationships through clear communication starting there.

In Conclusion

Being the best kept secret isn’t fair to your organization. There are people who will benefit from what you provide who don’t (yet) know that you’re there. To create awareness you will need a strategy. You will need to understand who your audience is, which message you want to communicate, and where you’d like to push it out.

It’s ok if you don’t know where to start. As your strategic partner, Siren can help navigate you through this process and create a strong strategy.

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