How to define your (English-Speaking) Target Audience

As a company based in Germany with international customers, your online marketing outreach is essential. You need to define your English-speaking target audience so that you understand their problems and their needs. And then you can target your marketing to meet those needs.

This post will give you some ideas on how to identify your English-speaking target audience so that you can create your Marketing Mission Statement – which forms the base of all your marketing activities.

First, start by visualising your prospective clients. The first distinction to make here is between B2C (Business to Customer – if you sell directly to the consumer of your product) or B2B (you sell to another company).

Here are some questions for B2C clients:

• Where do they live?
• What car do they drive?
• Where did they go to school?
• What is their job?
• What is important to them?
• What is relevant in their lifestyle/business that your product touches on?

If you work in B2B, you first have to identify the company’s decision-makers. For example, if you sell software, the decision-makers might be from the IT department, paired with someone from the relevant department, e.g., from Sales or Purchasing. Then you are also asking questions such as:

• Where are they based?
• Who are their clients?
• What is their business/industry?
• What are their strategic goals?
• What size is their business, how many employees, what is their turnover?
• What is the position of the person searching, e.g. is it someone in marketing, IT, sales?

My example: my prospective client works in the marketing department of an SMB based in the DACH region, with an international client base.  

With this initial assessment, you are ready to get to know your prospective clients better. Next, you have to identify what we in Marketing often describe as ‘Pain points’.

What are Pain points?

I dislike the word ‘pain points’, but it’s generally used and understood, so I’ll use it here. A pain point is a specific problem or issue that your prospective customer is experiencing. Here are some common pain points in B2B:

• Financial, e.g., the product they use at the moment is too expensive
• Process and Productivity, e.g., they use time-consuming manual processes
• Disconnected digital tools, e.g., they use several software tools that don’t ‘talk’ to each other
• Finding and retaining staff

When you are thinking of your client’s problems, be careful to look from your client’s perspective. Consider what they are looking for, not what you are looking to sell. Remember – there’s a difference between a PERCEIVED problem and an actual problem. Here’s an example from my work.

I write blog posts for executives to post on LinkedIn or their corporate blog. When I first set up my website, I described this as Executive Ghostwriting services and had a whole section dedicated to promoting this service. Then I thought about it some more and realised that this was nonsense. It’s just a marketing blah blah name. No one would search for ‘executive ghostwriter’ on google! My target audience, in this case, is likely the executive’s assistant or someone in the marketing department who was asked to find someone to write blog posts in English. They won’t search for an ‘Executive Ghostwriter’, but they would search for ‘Texter Englisch blog’ or ‘Texter LinkedIn Englisch’. And hopefully, they’ll find me!

Reframe the Pain Point

Your potential customer knows that they have a problem. They don’t need you to tell them that. Instead of pointing out the obvious, show that you have empathy for their problem and have a solution.

Look at the difference between these two statements:

Is the English content on your website embarrassing? Do you struggle to create professional content in English? Do you hesitate to send a link to your site to an English-speaking prospective client?

Vs

Would you like to impress prospective customers with a polished and professional website, including well-written English content? Do you want English-speaking prospects to immediately understand your product or services and the benefit they will receive by becoming your customer?

Ok, so you’ve identified your Target Audience and their pain points. Now it’s time to create your Marketing Mission Statement, the foundation of all your marketing activities.