3 Ways Your Brand Can Interact With Hard-To-Reach Audiences

3 ways your brand can interact with hard-to-reach audiences

Reaching target audiences goes beyond defining them and creating relevant content. Understanding the dynamic shift in consumer preferences in relation to social media, picking the right channel, and personalizing customers’ experiences are some of the biggest challenges companies face in reaching their target audiences.

While this is a universal occurrence in the business world, things can get even more difficult with hard-to-reach audiences. These groups are more challenging to engage with through regular marketing and outreach strategies, whether they speak a different language than the rest of the population or live in remote areas.

Regardless of the reasons that these audiences are difficult to reach, companies often fail to understand them, overlooking their needs and desires. But this should change ― so here’s how to communicate with hard-to-reach audiences.

Study your target audience

Learning about your target audience is necessary to clarify your position among them. Gathering valuable data can be challenging without professional help, but you can collaborate with a specialized company offering data collection services. These brands have wide access to an impressive range of audience partners who can help you with an accurate targeted sample.

Make sure you’re equipped with plenty of patience and persistence, as finding valuable audience insights is not that straightforward. At the same time, you should be open to understanding what drives these audiences so you can develop effective marketing strategies and actually respond to their needs.

Adapt your messages

Standardized messages don’t get through to audiences on social media, as they don’t speak out to people. Tailoring your messages based on the audience means making them feel seen, addressing their pain points, and offering solutions to their real problems.

Messages should also be accessible in terms of language, so consider your audience’s abilities to read or hear messages in their native languages. Generally speaking, social media content should provide:

• Captions or subtitles to videos;
• Alt Text to describe images for accessibility programs;
• Using contrasting colors in graphic design;

Leverage the impact of social media

Social media is beneficial to society as it helps people from numerous communities connect and help each other. At the same time, social media channels can be a valuable gateway to engaging with these groups, but popular applications might not always be the best place to start searching. That’s because some of these hard-to-reach audiences use specialized apps where they can feel safe sharing their experiences or socializing.

You can use community listening tools to analyze some features of these audiences, but considering the difficulty of the task, it would be best to collaborate with a special agency. These services come with premium tools that can get through different social pathways and improve the research phase from social media apps.

What about focus groups?

In some cases, marketers choose to work with focus groups to achieve insights on specific products or services. While this can be already challenging, doing this with a hard-to-reach audience can raise several limitations, but you can ace it by:

• Considering pilot testing and recruiting through specific channels;
• Offering proper incentives, such as gift cards or vouchers;
• Establishing a connection with the participants;
• Testing the efficiency of a virtual focus group;
• Empathizing with people and welcoming their contributions;

Many companies might underestimate these audiences, but working with them is key to opening the world to accepting them and realizing their importance in society. We’re not marketing products that anyone can buy ― we’re offering solutions to real-world problems.

The contribution to machine learning to target audiences

As artificial intelligence and machine learning become more usable in the marketing industry, companies approach these models to test synthetic data, which is artificially generated information that mimics the features of real data.

A growing number of marketers leverage synthetic data for media experiments, testing different digital advertising campaigns in a process called market matching. Long-term models can build the data efficiently enough to predict values.

This type of data is also unique in media mix modeling, which is needed for data augmentation and forecasting. Therefore, synthetic data allows marketers to explore hypothetical scenarios and test unique model specifications, which is one of the most efficient yet complex ways to find out more about a hard-to-reach audience.

Overcoming the challenges of reaching such an audience

The most prominent issue marketers face with hard-to-reach audiences is actually identifying them and their values. However, as we discussed some of the ways to achieve this task, we should also consider data privacy and compliance when engaging with groups, as you must navigate the complex landscape of compliance requirements simultaneously while harnessing customer data. Consider following standards like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). It’s also crucial to work only with high-quality data to comprehend your audience and seize the impact of the campaign’s performance. Measuring and optimizing continuously is as important as starting it.

Are you ready to reach your audience?

Companies often struggle to understand their target audiences and adapt to their needs accordingly, but this intensifies with hard-to-reach audiences. That’s because they’re not that easily approachable with regular social media posts, so marketers must adapt their techniques by understanding who they are working for. With the help of proper methods, your brand must address the audience’s pain points and engage with them on efficient channels.