Target Audience

Find the People Your Organization Needs to Thrive

Successful organizations center their work on the people who are most important to their success, whether they are customers, donors, clients, or volunteers.  

At Context, we work with organizations to develop target audiences that help them understand who the people are, how to organize them, the most effective ways to reach them, and how to get them to act.

We use this information to deliver an organization’s content across the web, mobile apps, and social media.

When it comes to audience development, we never use one size fits all approach. At Context, we understand that a target audience can range from a few dozen key policymakers to a few thousand people in a neighborhood, to millions of millennials who like to cook, to anything and everything in-between.

Grouping people together makes it easier for an organization to understand who it’s trying to reach, allowing the organization to test different messages and delivery methods. 

The data from these tests allow an organization to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of its communication and marketing work. An effect that grows over time as it learns more about its audience.

Audience Development

Having a defined audience allows an organization to focus on growing its audience and deepening people’s relationship with the organization.

Developing a Target Audience

Developing a target audience starts by understanding the actions people need to take for an organization to be successful. Whether it’s getting customers to make a purchase or donors to write a check, the path to success is about connecting people and actions to outcomes.

Target audiences are groups of people who share specific characteristics; this can include demographics, geography, occupation, relationship to the organization, or actions they’ve taken.

The value of using target audiences is that people with similar characteristics are likely to act in similar ways and be found in similar places.

Defining an audience helps organizations effectively deliver messages that resonate with each group, increasing the likelihood that people will take the desired action. Having a defined audience makes it easier to understand and use data to improve an organization’s knowledge about the people it’s trying to reach.

The more an organization knows about its audience, the more it’s able to test messages and approaches, increasing its long-term capacity to engage the people it needs to be successful.

Audience Behavior

Understanding how groups behave allows organizations to take their work to the next level. The more an organization understands its audiences’ behavior, the easier it is to develop content that gets people to take specific actions.

Most organizations already have access to significant amounts of data to help them understand their audience. The data can come from an organization’s website, email, social media, programs, sales, and a range of other internal and external sources.

At Context, we connect data from multiple sources and organize it in ways that provide decision makers with the information they need to make informed decisions.

Deepen Audience Engagement

Once an organization understands its audience’s behavior it can start developing strategies to deepen engagement. The stronger the bonds between an organization and the people in its target audience the easier it is to move them to action. Having a strong connection with its audience can also help an organization be more resilient in tough times.

At Context, we help organizations deepen engagement by identifying the most effective ways to reach people, creating content that resonates, and developing a plan that works within the organization’s available resources.

To make this happen we create opportunities for interaction through social media, websites, advertising campaigns, email, paid media, personal interactions, newsletters, telephone calls, and earned media.

The key to deepening engagement is to create a series of positive impressions each time a person sees a reference to an organization.

The goal is to build up enough positive impressions that a person feels a strong enough connection to an organization that when they’re making a decision they choose one that supports the organization. This is true whether a person is making a donation, buying a gadget, or deciding what to believe.

As with all relationships, engagement is an ongoing process that works better when it’s intentional. It can be helpful for organizations to think about engagement as a scale that ranges from advocate to blissfully ignorant.

By moving people from unaware to connected organizations can build their digital capacity. As people move towards the inner circles the goal becomes to connect with them on an ongoing basis to strengthen their bond to the organization.

Audience Growth

At Context, we help organizations grow their audience by using strategies that put the organization in front of the people it needs to reach to be successful. We do this by taking a holistic approach that combines the creative, technical, and data-driven aspects of communications.

A few strategies and tools we use include sign-up forms, remarketing pixels, and paid advertisements along with creative content designed for specific audience groups and data collection strategies that provide actionable data.

Capabilites

A few ways Context helps organizations develop their target audience. Audience development projects can be stand-alone projects or incorporated into other work. 

Target Audiences

Context develops target audiences using people’s demographics, geography, interests, and behavior to help organizations focus their time and energy on reaching the people who are most important to their success.

Target audiences can be used for digital and print advertising, fundraising, program development, product sales, advocacy, outreach, strategic planning, and more.

Audience Behavior

Context uses a variety of tools and strategies to help organizations understand their audience’s behavior. Understanding what actions different types of users take allows organizations to adjust their strategies to make sure they’re investing time and resources into things that work.

Our work includes connecting multiple data sources, such as websites, social media, and online advertising, through dashboards that provide decision makers with the information they need to understand an audience’s behavior.

List Building

List building is critical for organizations trying to build their digital capacity. Context helps organizations use best practices to grow their email lists, remarketing audiences, and social media follower counts. The bigger and more expansive an organization’s list is, the greater the organization’s reach.

A few ways Context helps organizations build their lists is through interstitials, digital ads, social media, remarketing pixels, and content marketing.

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