Who's Your Audience

I'm not re I didn't reboot or anything. I was just, you're not a robot. I was just dumping out the profound sadness I had for a second. Ah, it's gone. Okay. It's like when you shut the computer down and turn it back on again and then everything seemed to be, it just clears everything out. Hey, alright.

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Alright. Here we go. Let's do this. I love it. Yeah.

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Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your host, Eric and Mike. All right, so let's talk about who's your audience. 'cause I think that the every marketing topic, every time we talk to clients about marketing, every time, it always begins with this conversation of.

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Who is your audience and how do we refine and engineer our messaging directly so that it hits solid with them? Yeah, yeah. Because it's super important. Yeah. I mean, if you don't know who you're talking to, yeah. And you just say, as I worked for a large consumer packaged goods company many years ago, they would gimme creative briefs that would tell me things like.

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Our audience is male, female, 18 to 65, and that was it. That was the audience. Yeah. So that really narrowed it down nicely for me. Yeah, you really cut off of, you know. Yeah. I mean, there was maybe 4%, like 10% of the population. Really? Yeah. So no children and no elderly. Yeah. So yeah, like only 85% of the population fits that description.

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Yeah, that's, that doesn't count. Sorry. That's No, that's not, no, not at all. That's not an audience description, right? Yeah. So 18 to 35 men and women, gimme an example of like, what, what works better? Like, I mean, I think if you've got a broad reach, like your target and your brand, you're trying to market things for Target, maybe that demographic is okay, right?

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Mm-hmm. But they're, they're still not going that broad, right? They've, they've figured out what resonates. With the people who like Target, as opposed to the people who like Walmart, right? Mm-hmm. Like there's a differentiation. You're never gonna mistake a Walmart commercial for a Target commercial. That's a good point.

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Okay. Right. So, so you've got these really broad, you know, category thing here, but even in there you've got these kinda like, almost like affinity groups, right? Like Target's probably more like design conscious, you know, they, they still care about savings, but they're, there's a identity that they see in.

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Target that they might not see at Walmart. Mm-hmm. Or something like that, right? Mm-hmm. And a lot of that goes back to brand, which we talk about a lot. Right. But I think for, for smaller audiences, you, you're not, we're not talking about like brand marketing or anything like that. We're really trying to get to like talking about products and how they help people with their needs or problems.

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Very specific needs and problems. Yeah. Not just, I'm hungry. Yes. But like. Diving way deeper into the details around that. Yeah. Niching down. Is that a phrase That is, I think if your business strategy might already have that kind of established. Yeah. If you don't, if you don't know what your niche is, I mean, that's a good case to back up and like, mm-hmm.

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Alright. Who is our ideal customer? Ideally, it's all wrapped up in one thing. Okay. One, one, nice package. You know who your target audience is, who your ideal customer is, and, um, you're, you've got the product fit for that audience, for that customer. How, how detailed do we need to get with that, let's say worst case scenario, women and men, 18 to 64.

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There's a lot more detail we need to fill in there, correct? Yeah. Oh, it, I mean, it, it's, so, I think it's so specific to whatever your, your product or service is. Right. So, okay. Let's just take it for an example then a smaller company where might be a good place for them to start to kind of identify who that customer is.

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They've obviously got a customer base. Mm-hmm. Where do they begin though, to kind of help define that further? I mean, looking at your existing customers is probably a. I would think as a goldmine for something, you know, from mm-hmm. For some more data. Right? Like at first, like, I mean, ideally you've got a list in or a spreadsheet where you know who all your customers are and you know, some of the other things because you've been collecting information from them.

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Mm-hmm. You know, what the, what industry they're in, what's their, where are their job titles, what are they, you know, with that customer list could have some gold in there as if you're trying to figure out, you know, who is your. Average customer, let's say. Mm-hmm. And there might be a mismatch of like, who your ideal customer is and who your average customer is.

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Um, and that could be something that you might need to sort out later. But if you're, if you don't have that ideal customer, sort it out, starting with your average and figuring out, okay, here's who our, here's our customers, here's something that's true for most of them. Um, these are the ones that drive most revenue.

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Like, let's. Prioritize that and let's dive deeper into that segment of our existing customer base. Yeah, so there's like a business case to be made to here's all your customers. Yes, there's an average customer, but looking at that list then and identifying it, matching up to business goals, then that's where you start to kind of refine down a little bit more to say, look at your audience list and the ones that are not providing me.

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Profit or are harder to work with or just there's a lot of friction around them. Do what you can to maybe not work with them as much as possible. Yeah. And really refine your. Provider or your client list. Yeah. I'm assuming those ones that you're talking about are not on the most profitable side of things too, right?

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Yeah. Like so I mean, looking at your existing list and like, you might have to categorize 'em too, and it might be better to categorize them, right? Mm-hmm. You like, I think a lot of businesses there isn't one true audience. You might have something that appeals to multiple, multiple audiences, and so doing that assessment of who they are and getting a clear idea, you might.

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You, you'll probably see some pattern patterns emerge that you can then take to mm-hmm. Do a deeper dive on each one of them. And then we start to get into, and we've mentioned this before, kind of as we do deeper dive on them, uh. Here's the thing is like a lot of the CRM tools that we use, or a lot of the information that we gather from our customers is pretty limited.

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We don't have, yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I don't know how many kids a lot of our clients have. I don't know their name. I don't know what their hobbies are. I don't know what their lifestyle is like. Yeah, I know their email address and their phone number and their position in the company and their name. Yeah.

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A lot of times that's a limiting. Collection of data that mm-hmm. Doesn't allow us to kind of paint a full portrait of, this is Jill, she's 35, she likes yoga, she does this. Yeah. She has two kids. They play soccer. You know, like that's a deeper, like, psychographic outline of a customer that is a lot more challenging to build.

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Yeah. But I argue it's probably a, if you, if you wanna spend the time, that might be a good way. To get kind of an aggregate collection of one of your customers that you could really target down to very specifically. But I, I would argue that if you're small in your budgets and time are pretty tight.

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Mm-hmm. That might be kind of, I think your foot might be focusing on the wrong details there, right? Like, um. What they do in their spare time, how many kids, you know, that's probably important for your overall branding and coming up with a, a vibe that you want people to resonate with. But if you're just, if you're trying to market a product and trying to sell it, like focusing more on the problems and needs that people your customers have mm-hmm.

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Would be more, more effective because you can. Knowing those means that you, you're unlocking how you can sell your product to them. Mm-hmm. It's, it's a more direct line. Like I think what you're talking about is probably has a good space in the brand marketing mm-hmm. Side of things where you're not trying to sell something directly or, or market a specific solution to people's needs.

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I see a new model emerging here where it's. Here's Sally. She really hates to do these eight things. Yeah. Yeah. Is that maybe a better model to kinda look at? I think, yeah. I definitely, I think, I think if you can focus, if you can get deep into the, the wants, the needs, the problems that your I, that your audience, your customers face, and you have those clearly defined.

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Mm-hmm. There's so many. Let's say for one problem, there's probably a bunch of different ways you can message how your product can help with that problem. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, and without that problem defined, um, you're, you might be kinda spinning your wheels or just, you might get kind stuck in that. Like, Hey, here's all the things our product does.

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Mm-hmm. And if you, it's a common thing that used to happen, the, I guess the textbook definition is how Apple compared its features to like Dell. Dell would just say, Hey, here's all the stats of all the things we provide. Yeah. And they're not, they weren't showing examples of problems that you could. Yeah.

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Solve with the computer as much. And so whereas like Apple would be like they leaned in the creative market and they showed how their computer, instead of like saying, here's all the specs on it. Yeah. Our powerful computers can let you do these amazing, you know, video projects. Creative or creative. Yeah.

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These creative projects connect with people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So don't sell features. That's the model. That's the model I think that emerged from that whole market, from that philosophy was Yeah. Features. Are irrelevant. People can't make the connection to why that feature makes a lot of sense for them.

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Yeah. They know it might add more money and cost to the product, which is not really what you're trying to say. Yeah. What you're trying to say is, yeah, it might be a little bit more, but we're fixing this and you're now gonna have a better life because of X, you know? Yeah. Or whatever this thing allows you to do.

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Yeah. Not so much what all these features do, what they cost, and why. You know, you get three or four levels down the, the story and then it, then it's relative. Yeah. Then it makes sense, which people don't wanna make that connection. People don't, I think it's really hard to make that connection. Like, like I think we expect, we get caught in the.

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In our own bubble of whatever our, our service or product is. Right? Right. And we don't, we, we make logical conclusions of like, Hey, here's all the things we do. Mm-hmm. Can't see, can everybody see how this would solve their problem? And it, and it, and it might not. It's not that apparent. Yeah. And people have a hundred billion other things on their mind, right?

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Mm-hmm. Like so if you can help build that bridge to, and show how this, we have the solution to X mm-hmm. For them, and make it very clear to them, you're taking some cognitive load off their head. Nice. And you know, making it a little bit easier to understand what you're doing and how you can help. I need that in my life.

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Less cognitive load. Oh yeah. That don't wanna make a t-shirt that says, uh, totally. You mentioned earlier a little bit about really getting down into this one, we'll call it a segment, like how many segments should we investigate? I mean, is there just one segment? Does it make sense to outline four? How do we determine if we're really picking that one thing that we, that one problem that we solve?

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Isn't that just one segment? I, I think it's, it's so contextual. It depends on your, your current customer base, right? Mm-hmm. Patterns emerge as far as like, who you're, who they are. Like, oh, like, oh, look at this. We have, we have this, um, this entitle we, let's say it's industry based, like mm-hmm. We have a product that fits like two very distinct industries.

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That don't have a lot of overlap, but we have a product that helps them with that. Like those, there's your two segments. I, I've got a good example for this. Cast iron skillets. Okay. That's a really interesting thing because I think there's two very distinct segments to that. Okay. That they could market to.

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One, of course is the old, old fashioned, you know, outdoors person. Yep. That camps. Yep. And I just want something I can throw in the camper and throw on a fire. Doesn't matter. If I could throw it in the lake and pull it out two years later, scrub it off and use it again. It's just the most sturdy, timeless piece of cooking gear.

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Totally. Then you've got, now I think, another segment of people that are very culinary masters, you know? Mm-hmm. They love to cook. They love fine to create fine dishes in their own home, and they might look at. Just, there's an exclusive feature to cast iron skillets that you cannot get out of other, you can heat that thing up to 700 degrees and throw on a piece of fish or something and just sear it instantly.

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Yep. And there's a whole different storyline behind that. Mm-hmm. That does not relate at all to outdoors person, camper person. Yes. Right. Yeah. So that's an example of where you could look at your product or service line. Yeah, really dive down and identify this is being used by these three different types of people that are very diverse.

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Yeah. For these specific reasons. And then there's your segments. Is that kind of what you're saying? And that's definitely a very clear way of looking at it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think it's the, everyone's gonna be different, but I think it, if you can look and draw a circle around, like if you. Pull out all the themes from your customer list.

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Mm-hmm. And like, what are these different things? Like maybe it's, maybe you just realize that our, all of our, most of our customers are CEOs and then the mm-hmm. The, you know, like the, hey, there's a segment there like that, that, oh, hey, we're direct. We are, we are a fit for the decision makers here. Their problems are gonna be different than maybe somebody who's a little bit, um.

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Further down the chain, let's say that's, yeah. Right. That's, yeah. Because they're not just, they're, they're looking for somebody to get the thing done. They're not looking for support or well remove risk maybe. Yeah. You know, like they're, they don't want, they, they're looking at the risk factor behind this decision.

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Yeah. And the person doing the thing might be like, I'm looking at efficiency side of things. Yeah. You know, like, I need this piece of software or this service. Yeah. So the, I mean, titles, I mean, they, it might be, it might be titles, it might be industries, um, it might be, um, it maybe if you've got a product line where everything's kind of, seems integrated to you, but you've got a certain, certain people are only using this one product and you compare that to the other product, if there's a disconnect there, like maybe those are, those are segments or like buckets that you could throw people into.

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Mm-hmm. I think it's really. Doing a deep dive in your customer list, evaluating everything, probably writing a bunch of them up on a whiteboard or on a big sheet of paper or something, and just try and look for some of these connections and like logical groupings of those things might help you. It, it, it'll help you.

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At least start going in the right direction. Yeah. As you go to the next steps, you get into it, you could start just one small cam. If you, if you're just starting out or just looking at, okay, we're gonna like, ramp up our marketing or our advertising efforts around these things to kind of build, so just pick one.

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Mm-hmm. And just work on that. Yeah. And then test it and optimize it and then move on maybe to the next one. Yeah. When we talk about kind of tactical strategies around these things, what other ways can we, uh, go and find. More information for about these audiences. So I, I think probably the best thing you can do when you're trying to get a better picture of who your audience is, is to interview your CU current customers.

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So if you've got this list of people and you've identified your, your segments or whatever mm-hmm. Look at, look at your best customers in those things. Interview 'em like mm-hmm. Doesn't take a lot of time. Like you could spend 15, 30 minutes, 15 seems a little short, but maybe 30 minutes with each one.

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Right. Right. And the funny thing about interviews and everything is you don't have to, I'm not talking about doing like 40 of these things, right? Yeah. Like, you could probably get to around five and they're, you're gonna start hearing some of the same things from mm-hmm. Each one of them. Right? Like and, um, those are gold.

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The stuff you hear from that is 'cause you're getting it right from them. They're the people who are already buying and using your services. They know they've already, they've made that jump. Yeah. They don't have as much cognitive load anymore because they, they clearly understand what is there, but you can see how, how you've helped them.

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And you can figure out like, I think a lot of like success language, like where they're on the other side of it. What. What value do we bring to you? Mm-hmm. And you can kind of almost flip that on its head. Those, those. Success messages to figure out where they were before. Yeah. And then they've come up with more of that problem related language.

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Two points. One is emphasizing again, and I think we've mentioned this before, five is a really magical number. If you're looking to reserve, you know, resources, preserve resources and find out as much information when we've done, like user testing and mm-hmm. And talked to customers or done testimonial, uh, research around.

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It seems like once you get to five, everything else fits in those, whatever categories have kind of been already established within those first five. Yeah. Everything else fits into those same buckets, so yeah. I feel like there's a lot of the big, the big problem or the big themes Yeah. Come out right away.

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There's gonna be a whole bunch of little things that Yeah. Might fit into the other things. Yeah. Or they might be a more like. That person was having a bad day type comment. You know, it's not necessarily reflective of everything, but yeah, the clear patterns emerge very quickly, so that's a good way for small marketing teams to really not have to spend a lot of.

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Resources to get really good solid gold stuff. Totally. Second thing is doing that. If you can get somebody and record them on video, just uttering the words, I love what you do because you've solved this problem for me in my life is so much better because of it. This transformation that your product or service has done.

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Throw that on the website. Oh, it's, yeah. Copy the text. Yeah, like that's just valuable gold stuff that you can. I think you could check a lot of marketing boxes. Yeah. By spending that 30 minutes with somebody, you know, we'll, we, we will interview somebody and we'll get ideas for mm-hmm. What we need to be doing in the future.

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Like you said, we've got this kind of canned testimonial and even if the person doesn't wanna be like, recorded on video or put up on the website, right. You at least have you have a transcript of what they said. You can kind of. Mold it to something that's more website friendly. Mm-hmm. And run it by 'em.

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Say, Hey, you know, after our call, this is what we kind of took away. Would you mind if we promoted this on our website or in our, yeah. Marketing materials and I don't know the, we did this recently and everyone I talked to is like, yeah, oh no, that'd be great. I'd love to help. And so that. 30 minutes pays a lot of dividends.

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Yeah. It's super valuable. And it kind of closes that loop. It's like you're beginning to do the research. Yep. You get all the data that kind of inform future efforts, but you've also captured now what the value really is and then you can loop that back into the end of the process. Yeah. And use that as evidence to why we're.

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Talking to people like this. Yeah. Or why it's important to you to Yeah. Look at us for this reason. You know, it's, it's really valuable stuff there. So, yeah. Yeah. So I think that's, that's one of the best, absolute best things. You know, I think we've talked about too, like pattern matching with other companies that have done similar things or big giant companies.

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I know that we, you've done a lot of, uh, around web. User experience stuff, there's some great resources online that other gigantic providers Yeah. Have put out there that's just like, okay, well let's follow that pattern with our little spin on it. Yep. And that's a good way of kind of also speaking to that audience that might match.

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Yeah. A similar customer. Yeah. I think with a lot of things, and I, I've, I've applied it more with user experience stuff, but like if there's a big. A big company or a big place where you know that they've put a priority on user experience testing and they have huge user experience teams. They've done a lot of the hard work already.

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Yeah. It's like, see what you can to, like, you can borrow things from that and kind of remix it into your own Yeah. Version. Um, and yeah. I kind of, I call it like end around, like you're doing an end around, you're not doing all the deep, deep, deep research and collecting all the surveys and all the data and everything when you're doing digital ads, ordering Google ads or setting up a LinkedIn campaign or things like that.

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The questionnaire is like 14 miles long. I mean, you have like 85 questions like. Do they like coffee at 4:00 AM or do they like, you know, like there's so many detailed things that you gotta fill out on those things. It's right's creepy. Yeah. But yes. So I mean, what about like take, I don't want to get into the tactics of setting those things up, but what about looking at those questions and then taking that as almost a template for you to go back and fill in?

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'cause that might be part of your, and we're not gonna get into tactics, but that might be part of your tactics, is to. Buy some ads. Buy some ads on LinkedIn. Yeah. Buy some ads on Google. Look at those questionnaires. Look at the detail they have around their audience. Mm-hmm. Reconstitute it for you and see if you can fill that stuff out.

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Yeah, pretty easily. And it might be three or four different things. I, oh man. As a guy who spent a lot of time trying to like. Get the right audience definition in LinkedIn for ads recently, I'm just imagining a 20 page questionnaire. Of all the things and filling it and like you trying to fill that in like a Scantron SAT test.

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And it's, and uh, and some of them might not be relevant and everything like that. So I think it could be, if there's something on a smaller scale where there is this kind of like yeah, what's start with the end in mind type thing, right. The key pieces you need and then working backwards. I totally see how that could work.

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Okay. But like some of those things, they are so. So granular and so, you know, like, which, it's, it's wild. Which when you talk large scale marketing and advertising campaigns, they live in that data world. You can do things to like capture your own data and, and ideally, yes, your own data is a little, is more pristine and reliable.

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Exactly. But if you're relying on other people's. Data. Well, and think about scales of gigantic advertising campaigns. That's where the segmenting and it gets so granular. Yeah. Like they've got 25 personas potentially that they're talking to. Oh gosh. Which doesn't apply to our audience. You know, that's a, that's, we're trying to just identify one, two, maybe four at the very most.

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Right. I think it's, uh, yeah. I think the goal is to get as specific as possible with the, what's the. Minimum viable amount of audiences. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You can always build on top of there, but if you're, if you feel like you're saying everything to everyone, that that's a, that's the problem we're trying to really diagnose here, right?

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Like, like figure out what's the, how, how specific can you get and still apply to, you know, as many people's audience, enough of a market audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That pays the bills. And then if the specifics start. Knocking some people out of your, you know, ideal market, then that's probably another test to be like, yeah, okay, well we need to have, have different messaging for this, another segment for this thing here.

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Yeah. But it's all about the specifics and minimizing that cognitive load. Virtual water coolers. Yeah. This was something I saw that you had mentioned in the notes for this. Yeah. What exactly does that mean? So I, so I think if you were, you know, we talked a little bit about like, well, if you use your customer base as your, mm-hmm.

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As your starting point, right? Mm-hmm. Now, if you're trying something new or you're, maybe you're a, maybe you're a new company or, um. Yeah. New product offering or something. Or maybe you're like, you, you think there's an application for your thing to a market that you haven't utilized yet. Right. Like I think there's a lot of, there are virtual water coolers out there.

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Not when I say that. I mean like Reddit pages, Facebook groups mm-hmm. Things like that where, where people that might meet your ideal profile, they're, they're actively discussing things, right? You can look into those and see a lot of. Like problem, language and things mm-hmm. That people are kind of sorting, you know, trying to sort through solve Yeah.

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And everything like that fix. So I think that's a really, really easy way to kind of get an idea of mm-hmm. You know, what your customer's needs are part of that research. You want have your sales team involved, I would think. Right. I mean, 'cause they're on the front lines of a lot of this. Yeah. Any, any frontline people, like I'm assuming in some marketers aren't on the front lines.

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Right? Right. They're just, they're not. Talking to customers all the, all the time. Mm. And the people who are, are the people who are trying to sell your stuff. Mm-hmm. And the people who are dealing with the people who have sold it, right? Mm. Like they've, they know the customers pretty well. There's probably a lot of, mm-hmm.

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Like, oh, if I had a dime for every time somebody mentioned that, like. That's gold right there. Mm-hmm. Like if the sales person can say that and you're like, oh, that's something we should be talking about, that's something we should try. That's a need that we should be trying to fill. Well, and customer service, like you said.

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Yeah. Like if the people are calling about, oh, this shoe, it's got, you know, it really hurts at the top here and you get 85 calls for that, not only is that like, okay, a marketing and a messaging issue, but that's also like an RD thing too. I mean, it could be. Yeah. I would imagine. It's really critical to have those people Yeah.

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Involved giving you that feedback as many people that are talking to your actual customers on a daily basis, the better for sure. And it can, and it can help evolve a lot of pieces to the business as well. Okay. We can't, you know, the, the 800 pound gorilla in the room, every episode we bring it up. Ai. Yeah.

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How does that apply to this process? What have you seen or used? If you think back to it like AI is hoovering up all of the content and information that is available online. Mm-hmm. Staggering amounts of stuff, right? Yes. Like there's a pretty darn good chance that the information you wanna know about your customers has been synthesized by all this stuff.

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Mm. Okay. So I think especially if you're trying something new or you want to test out something. Mm-hmm. AI can be a really good. Um, tool to get a sense of what's going on there. Like, um, let's say you do have a customer kind of defined that, like, and you want to know, you know, what are the ones, what are the needs?

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What are problems they face? Mm-hmm. Ask ai, you're gonna get a list. There's actually more like in chat GT, there's some of these custom GPTs where they're all about like persona, you know, builders or something like that, right? They will even coach you through questions that to. Get more data out of it.

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But even if you don't wanna go searching for those and you just to say, Hey, I have this customer, fill in what you know about it. It's like, what are some potential pain points they have in their day-to-day work? That's a good tip. Yeah, exactly. And it'll give you a list. It'll give you a pretty darn good list.

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And you can, you can kind of vet it after that. I wouldn't take it as gospel. No, but you can vet it and go, yeah, that seems really true. That seems true. That seems true. And. Kind of file that away or kind of iterate on that a little bit more. What's the next logical thing to find, to dig down into that?

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Like pulling on those threads within Yeah, like, like, oh, that pa, that sound, that pain point sounds like they don't really have enough time. Our product would be able to do this in this. How do you think that would help them? Mm-hmm. And then get, get more. And it's just, I think it's a really good research tool there for being able to.

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Get a sense of who they are and devoid of having a customer list to work on or salespeople to work with. Yeah. Like you might be in an industry where that's not, not really apparent. So digging into those. Well, and, and another way to do it, I love the idea of asking a questions 'cause I think or having it ask you questions.

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Yeah. Because I think that that's really one of the more valuable things that refine the results that I get out of those tools. Mm-hmm. Is start with. Yeah, presenting your problem, your question, and then asking it to ask you really relevant questions that help it refine its answers down. Yeah. There's really interesting, you know, threads that we talk about that.

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AI has a really, if you send it out to look for that stuff, yeah. It can come back with some really pretty revolutionary kind of, totally thinking around that stuff. Yeah. But again, apply your filters and I review, review, review and what I like to do with that. Let's say you've, if you've gone through this work, you've interviewed everybody, you've, um, had your, talked to your customer service people or your sales people, um, you've looked at.

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The virtual water coolers. Mm-hmm. And you've clearly defined who that audience is. I think documenting that, like you'll see online, there's a lot of persona tools mm-hmm. Or something like that. And I don't know if you have to get that fancy on, on things, but if you can clearly define who that customer is and those problems, their, their wants, their needs in some kind of document, and have that available, let be.

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You can, to your point with the AI thing, you can. It AI is getting the point where it can remember a lot of those things too. Yeah. Or if it doesn't, or you know, having a document that you could upload along with your request and say, Hey, refer to this persona for this as I'm working on this, this, this, this.

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It'll help. Help with a lot of your other next steps as you're trying to take this audience definition and work with it. It keeps it front and center in its brain as it's helping you to go through the process. Yeah, yeah. But it's really important, and I think this is one of those tips, if you're worried about AI stealing your stuff, pay Forche GPT.

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Yeah. Because then you can isolate it, build a mode around it. That's only your data set. That doesn't get. Out into other marketing efforts, and then it still is a little bit more purely yours. There's a lot. I would just check with whatever your tool of choice is. Yeah. And look and see what, what their policies are for that.

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You know, we love it. We hate it. It's this push pull that we'll probably always live with, with any, and I don't know, I know a lot of these things I, you know, like when it comes to like defining an audience and what their problems are, you're really a like. I, I don't think you're doing, I don't. For us in the level we're at, yeah.

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We're not doing anything groundbreaking. There we're, oh, my, we're trying to like, geez, we're innovating every damn day. We're innovating humanity, huh? Yeah. New, new spins on humanity. That's, we're reinterpreting humanity. Humans are humans. We're just trying to, maybe that's our tagline. What's that?

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Reinterpreting humanity. Wow. I don't know how, yeah. I just throwing it out there. I don't know if I have the brain power to, to even help with that. It's, don't worry about it. I got it. Okay. Alright. Me and the robots, we'll take care of it. Alright. We'll reinterpret humanity. Yeah. Is that what I just said?

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Reinventing. Reinventing. Oh, reinventing humanity. Yeah. That sounds a little more challenging, but we're, I'm up for it. Some very challenging. Yeah. What is that? Like a DNA code change switch thing. That's where I'm going. It just feels like we're. Headed for alien, Romulus type. I don't wanna get too dark, but maybe it's already happened.

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Social media has changed, changed us since reinventing our humanity, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely done that.

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Mike, I'm back. Or is it Mike? We need to, yeah. No, but we need to. Alright. Okay. I'm not, I'm not re I didn't reboot or anything. I was just, you're not a robot. I was just dumping out the profound sadness I had for a second. Ah, it's gone. Okay. It's like when you shut the computer down and turn it back on again and then everything seems to be, it just clears everything out.

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Hey, alright. Alright. We go. Let's do this. I love it. Yeah. All right. Let's recap then. Okay. Identifying who's your audience. Yeah. We want to go into, I think first, obviously you look at your customer base and you refine that list down to your most profitable or whatever makes most sense for your business, right?

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Yeah. You wanna optimize for that specific customer, not so much all of your customers. Yeah. The ones that make the most sense for your business. Yep. We also want to talk to them. We want to have customer service and sales teams also that do most of the interface maybe with the customer base, get their input on things.

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Yeah. Really define it down. Very detailed description of who this, what problems we're solving for this customer. Yep. What pain we're taking away. We have a bunch of tools that we can use for this. We can kind of reverse engineer some of the questionnaires around ad campaigns within Google and LinkedIn.

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See, yes, there's way too many questions that they ask. Mm-hmm. But that's kind of relative or relevant information that you could then kind of Yes. Import into maybe a questionnaire or. Outline our audiences, this person or these sets of persons potentially. We'll wanna segment too. 'cause your product or service if, if it if warranted it.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're, when you're evaluating your customer list and or your aspirations for your ideal customer, um, that'll become more apparent, you know? Yeah. But I think it's more like this whole exercise is about get, like just saying, I help. These people is not enough to know your audience.

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You gotta go deeper. You gotta to be more effective. You can't just back to the whole thing. You can't talk about features. Your features are your product. You have to talk about how you can make your customer's lives better by using this product and message that. And the only way you're gonna effectively do that is getting down to the specifics.

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It's all about reducing that cognitive load. Oh wow. I've got way too much cognitive load right now. I can feel it like Uhoh. I need to have like a watch that tells me how much cognitive load I've got right now. It's not on your, on your ring. Maybe it's on my ring. I need to go investigate that. Like uhoh the statistics.

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Yeah. Yeah. Like your brain is working overtime. Yeah. Doesn't take much.

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We've got some tools that we talked about, kind of reverse engineering questionnaire and stuff, but there's also um, interviews and talking and testimonials and all those things. But then we talked about AI as well. Yeah, AI can be helpful. Yeah. Very helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of putting everything in, having it ask you questions, that's a really great way to do that.

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But the, you know, that's, I still think that the AI thing should be one of these like, last things when you don't have access to mm-hmm. A customer base or something like that when you don't have some of these other alternatives. I would definitely, 'cause you're gonna get a more accurate picture of your Yeah.

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Your, of what makes you special Yes. From your existing customers than any generalized AI response that you'll get and everybody's special. Okay. We're all, all companies are snowflakes. That's right. Yep. Unicorn. They all have their own dysfunctions and, and things that make them great. They're all, yep. Yeah.

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And AI can, we will just give you this kind of blah answer. If you don't really get in and, and have it, you know, help you define, that's what works for everybody else, then you gotta figure out how to make it your own. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I need to go reduce my cognitive load, Mike. Sweet. Yeah.

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Yeah. I think we can call an end to this podcast. Right. Just wipe it all out. That's right. Just go. All right, clear. All right. Thanks man. Thanks. Alright. Bye. Thanks for tuning in. For more information and other episodes, subscribe to the marketing team of one podcast on YouTube, apple, or Spotify podcast networks.

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You can also chat with us on the r slash marketing team of one subreddit or visit marketing team of one.com to learn more.

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