Small Bytes: Reaching 2+ target audiences with one brand

In this conversation, Martin Sully addresses the question of how to maintain a unified brand identity and consistent message for a two-sided marketplace with two target markets. He suggests creating personas for each target market and gathering information about their demographics, interests, and problems. By integrating this information with the brand values and message, it is possible to create content that resonates with both target markets. The key is to use language that is simple and free of jargon. The brand identity should remain consistent, but specific pages or landing pages can be created to address the different needs of each target market.

Key Takeaways

• Create personas for each target market to gather information about their demographics, interests, and problems.
• Integrate the gathered information with the brand values and message to create content that resonates with both target markets.
• Use language that is simple and free of jargon to ensure the message is understood by both target markets.
• Maintain a consistent brand identity while creating specific pages or landing pages to address the different needs of each target market.

Need to better understand your target audience? Read our blog post: Attracting Dream Customers and Repelling Customers

Transcript

Martin Sully (00:00.354)
Today, I'm quickly covering a really good question that came in from a LinkedIn connection. Now, they're new to me. I don't know them. Obviously, I obviously connect up with people and I love to learn about new people and what they do and how they're trying to help people.

So, and again, I learn just as much from you guys as I do from my peers. So when I speak to other strategists, other people in design, I learn a lot. But obviously, there's nothing that kind of helps drive things forward better than actually talking to the people that can want to learn from you and have questions because if they're struggling with them,

other people are. It's the problems that I like to solve.

and introduce you to friends of the show who are taking their brand to the next level.

Martin Sully (01:35.824)
I can see exactly why this question in particular would throw any business. And part of the reasoning lies in around the information being gated by the branding industry and industry jargon that needs to be bust apart. The question was when developing an effective brand strategy,

for a two-sided marketplace, how do you maintain a unified brand identity and consistent message that resonates effectively with both segments of the market? So to clarify the question, I asked, are you talking about having two markets but one brand or two brands that are completely separate.

And they replied, absolutely, we have two target markets, but one brand. for context, one side is a disability community and the other is disability inclusive businesses that, you know, we're connecting by one brand and their products. To start, I just want to say thank you! and that having two markets you speak to is actually quite common.

If you have two separate audiences you need to talk to, the best thing to do is to create them a persona each. And that's a bit like an expanded user profile. or like a bit of a bit of like an overview of their life. And you can find out a lot of this information just by talking to them.

And it will be Things like, so yeah, like their job, how old they are, you know, how much they interact with social media? That's like comes later. Other key things are like, Where do they live? What sort of, know, How much money do they make? And obviously not everybody is going to want to share. They might want to just say, give you a rough

Martin Sully (03:53.08)
What do they enjoy doing? What are their current problems with whatever your product is? If you briefly explain what you do and they have a problem with XYZ, recently with a skincare client, I had asked them what were the problems that people were solving.

And it was things like, they're really time poor. just, they just need a, like a five minute pamper and every day they can kind of get into it. And yeah, they want to learn a little bit more, have a little bit more education around the brand and around looking after their skin. That's perfect. Like all this stuff is really good information. And so when you take all that information back

If you want to read a bit more about it and the sort of questions that you can ask your ideal target audience, jump on. I've got a couple of episodes of the podcasts, ones around attracting your ideal client and ones repelling them. Both of those, there's a lot of information in those. Go and listen to them. Extract the questions that you need to ask people or alternatively jump on my website.

Get some information off there. There's a couple of good blog posts on those two topics too. Take that and join in that information with the brand values you're setting out and get an understanding of the emotional, functional and philosophical benefits that you want to actually create. Then from all that, that's how you get your message.

That's how you get really clear on it. You can then have content, I guess, that like side by side that almost talks to both groups, that integrates your brand values and the message. And actually what you'll probably find is that both target markets actually want similar things. The disability community want connection to the benefit.

Martin Sully (06:14.061)
And so do the businesses that work with that community. So you're actually end up talking to exactly the same people. There's just slight tweaks. Like you would probably, you'd need to just look at making sure that the language used isn't full of jargon is really simple to understand for both audiences. And that it resonates to both.

So when you've worked all of that stuff out, so you've got your personas, you've got your brand values, the actual message you want to send. Like all of this stuff is going to start integrating. Yeah, and it's really that will be the driving force. So it's not that you're creating separate websites or separate parts of the website. You might have like specific pages that talk.

and blog posts that talk to like one side of the community versus the businesses you want to connect with and how you can help them. It might even be that you have two separate landing pages, but you can still integrate that and kind of beautifully talk to that whole community because they all want the same one thing at the end of the day.

And like, there is, yeah, there is a lot more to unpick in this topic in itself. And obviously the intricacies of finding the right message and planning that all

Like, yeah, there's a lot to unpick. But the messaging really should be fairly straightforward. in answering the message, I guess the brand, the brand identity itself shouldn't change for the audience. But it should be more of a like a vehicle to pass on your message. I hope that kind of get went some ways to actually answering your question.

Martin Sully (08:21.15)
and made it simple to understand. Obviously, if there is a problem, like feel free to reach out and we can chat and it goes for anyone. See you on the next episode.