Understanding Your Target Audience: A Practical Guide to More Effective Marketing with Limited Resources
In today’s economic landscape, charities, community organisations, and social enterprises are adapting to new challenges with many diversifying their income streams alongside traditional funding routes.
While blending trading income with grants and donations has long been part of the third sector landscape, it has become essential as traditional funding sources become more limited and competitive.
As organisations develop these new income streams, effective marketing becomes important. Yet marketing in the third sector presents unique challenges. Unlike commercial organisations with dedicated marketing departments, charities and social enterprises often rely on talented team members who balance marketing responsibilities alongside other crucial roles.
The challenge isn’t about capability – it’s about capacity and resources. Even the most skilled teams can find themselves stretched across multiple marketing platforms and audiences, each requiring distinct approaches and messaging. When budgets are tight and every pound matters, getting your marketing to the right people in the right way makes all the difference.
Taking Time to Understand Your Audiences
When resources are stretched and time is limited, it can feel counterintuitive to pause and review who you’re trying to reach. Marketing already feels overwhelming when you’re juggling multiple priorities – you might be posting regularly on social media, sending out newsletters, and updating your website. Taking time out to analyse your audience might feel unjustified.
Yet investing time in understanding your audiences can save resources in the long run. Before diving into creating marketing strategies or investing in new platforms, it’s worth taking a step back and asking: are current efforts reaching the people who matter most to your organisation?
Understanding What’s Working (And What Isn’t)
Once you’ve decided to take that step back, it’s important to reflect on your current marketing efforts. Start by asking yourself some key questions:
- Which social media posts get the most engagement?
- Where do most of your visitors, customers, clients, community members etc. say they heard about you?
- What content seems to resonate with your supporters?
Many organisations discover patterns they hadn’t noticed before – perhaps those carefully crafted Facebook posts aren’t reaching anyone, while word of mouth through community networks is bringing in most of your new visitors. Maybe your detailed impact reports aren’t getting much attention, but simple stories about individual successes are being widely shared.
This kind of analysis generates many insights, but it may feel difficult to know what to do with it. For example, it could show that:
- They’re spending precious time maintaining social media platforms their key audiences rarely use.
- Their content, while professional and well-written, doesn’t address their audiences’ real needs or concerns.
- They’re missing opportunities to reach new audiences who could benefit from their services.
- Their messaging, though technically correct, doesn’t resonate with the people they want to reach.
This reflection isn’t about pointing out what’s not working – it’s about gaining clarity and confidence in your marketing decisions. When you understand what connects with your audiences, marketing can become less overwhelming. You can make informed choices about where to focus your energy, try new approaches based on what you’ve learned, and regularly review what’s making an impact.
Getting to Know Your Audiences: Beyond the Basics
When we talk about understanding audiences, it’s important to think beyond just your immediate circle. Your organisation has a complex network of stakeholders, each playing a vital role in your success and sustainability.
Primary Stakeholders
These are the groups whose engagement is crucial to your organisation’s core mission:
- People who directly use/buy/benefit from your services
- Staff and volunteers who deliver your services
- Board members and trustees
- Key funders, council or government who enable your work
- Regular donors or supporters
Your primary stakeholders often need the most frequent communication and engagement. They’re essential to your day-to-day operations and long-term sustainability, so understanding their needs and maintaining strong relationships is crucial.
Secondary Stakeholders
These groups might have less direct involvement but can significantly influence your success:
- Partner organisations and referral networks
- Local community groups and leaders
- Potential future funders or supporters
- Media and local press
- Policy makers and local authorities
- Similar organisations in your sector
While these stakeholders might need less frequent communication, maintaining good relationships with them can open new opportunities and strengthen your organisation’s position in the community.
Understanding Stakeholder Impact and Interest
To make informed decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts, it’s helpful to consider two key factors for each stakeholder group:
- Their level of interest in your organisation
- Their potential impact on your success
For example:
A major funder might have high impact but moderate interest – they need regular updates but focused on specific outcomes.
Regular customers or visitors have both high impact and high interest – requiring regular, detailed communication.
Local community members might have moderate impact but varying levels of interest – needing broader, more general communication.
Your stakeholders don’t exist in isolation – they’re often connected through complex community networks. Understanding these connections can help you:
- Identify natural communication channels.
- Build on existing relationships.
- Spot opportunities for collaboration
- Build stronger community presence.
- Make better use of word-of-mouth marketing
Pulling it All Together
By mapping your audiences, from your stakeholders to your wider community, you can be more strategic with your marketing efforts. If the aim of marketing is to provide the right messaging at the right time, known where, when and how to reach those audiences is crucial to success. This systematic approach to audience engagement will help ensure your organisations long-term impact and sustainability.
Making Strategic Decisions
Understanding your diverse stakeholder landscape transforms how you approach your marketing and communications. By mapping out your stakeholders and understanding their relative impact and interest, you can move from a reactive approach to one that feels more intentional and manageable.
This clarity helps you prioritise your marketing efforts more effectively, ensuring your limited resources are directed where they’ll create the most value. Instead of trying to communicate everything to everyone, you can use this to develop tailored approaches for different groups, such as creating:–
- monthly impact updates for funders,
- weekly social media engagement for supporters,
- quarterly newsletters for the broader community,
- weekly WhatsApp blasts for regular visitors.
Amongst other approaches that keep these groups engaged. This, in turn, strengthens relationships, allowing you to understand the needs and interests of each stakeholder group.
As a result your communications become more relevant and engaging, leading to better responses and more productive interactions.
Most importantly, you can feel confident in your decisions about where to focus your energy, knowing they’re based on a clear understanding of your stakeholder landscape rather than assumptions or habit.
Moving Beyond Demographics
Now that you’ve mapped out your stakeholders, it’s time to deepen that understanding. Think about your most successful engagements – whether that’s services that always have waiting lists, products that consistently sell out, events that book up within hours, or social media posts that get shared widely. What makes these activities so successful?
One common pitfall in third sector marketing is focusing too heavily on sharing achievements and success stories. While there’s certainly a place for sharing impact, constantly broadcasting your achievements can overshadow what really matters – how your product, service or organisation creates value for people.
It’s also easy to forget that many people don’t know who you are or what you do. When you’re immersed in your work, it’s natural to assume everyone understands your offering. But for many potential customers, service users or supporters, you’re completely new.
Put simply, they need to know three things: what you do, how they could benefit, and that they’d be welcome to engage with you – whether that’s buying your products, using your services, or supporting your cause.
Remember too that people rarely make instant decisions about engaging with a new organisation. They might see your social media posts several times, visit your website repeatedly, or hear about you from different sources before making a purchase or reaching out.
Making your basic information easily accessible and maintaining a welcoming tone across all channels is crucial for supporting this journey.
Think beyond demographics to understand their world. A customer considering your ethical products isn’t just looking for something to buy – they might be trying to make more sustainable choices while working with a limited budget. A community member thinking about your services might be weighing up different options or wondering if they qualify for support.
Understanding these deeper motivations helps you create messages that truly resonate and make it clear how you can help.
The key questions to consider are: What keeps your audiences awake at night? What are they hoping to achieve? What might make them hesitate to engage? And crucially – is it clear to someone brand new to your organisation what you offer and how they can contact you?
Focused Marketing
When you truly understand your audiences, marketing becomes less about broadcasting messages everywhere and more about having the right conversations in the right places, at the right time.
Instead of trying to maintain a presence everywhere, you can be strategic. If your ethical products sell best through Instagram but your support services get discovered through local networks, you can tailor your approach accordingly. Perhaps your regular customers prefer text updates about new stock, while your funders value quarterly email reports. Local community members might engage most through Facebook groups, while business partners check your LinkedIn.
The key is to match your method to your audience – and be confident in choosing not to use certain platforms or approaches. It’s better to do a few channels well than to spread yourself too thinly trying to be everywhere. Successful marketing isn’t about how many platforms you’re on – it’s about connecting in the right way with the people who matter to your organisation.
Practical steps to get started:
After understanding your stakeholder landscape and the importance of audience connections, you might be wondering where to begin. Here’s a practical approach that any organisation can implement:
- Start with One Audience
Choose a single audience group that has both high impact and high interest for your organisation. This might be your primary customers, key service users, or major supporters. Starting with one group helps make the process manageable and lets you learn what works before expanding your approach.
- Really get to Know Them
Use simple tools like personas or empathy mapping to understand this group better. What does their typical day look like? What challenges do they face? What are their hopes and fears? You might already have these insights from conversations with current service users or customers – now it’s about capturing and using them systematically.
- Test Your Assumptions
Check whether your understanding is accurate. Talk to existing customers or community members and ask for feedback. Watch how people interact with your current marketing and learn what needs adjusting when we look more closely.
- Map Their Journey
Identify where these people spend their time, both online and in physical spaces. Which social media platforms do they use? Which local groups or networks do they connect with? Where do they go for information or support? This helps you focus your presence where it matters most.
- Craft Messages That Matter
Develop messages that speak to their real needs and motivations. Include clear calls to action – what specific step do you want them to take? Remember to keep information about who you are and how to reach you easily visible.
- Measure Simply
Keep tracking simple but consistent. This might mean:
- Recording where new enquiries come from
- Tracking engagement on social posts
- Reviewing which messages get the most response
- Asking new customers how they found you
Most importantly, make it manageable for your organisation. Start small, learn what works, and build from there. Marketing doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective.
Remember:
- Start with one high-impact audience group
- Take time to understand their real needs and motivations
- Focus your efforts where they’ll make the most difference
- Keep your basic information clear and accessible
- Measure what matters in simple, consistent ways
Be confident in making choices about where to focus your limited time and resources. Your organisation doesn’t need to be everywhere or communicate everything to everyone. What matters is having the right conversations with the right people in the right places – whether that’s through Instagram, community networks, or quarterly reports.
By understanding your audiences better, you can move from feeling overwhelmed by marketing to feeling confident that your efforts are creating real value.
Next Steps
Are you just beginning to come to terms with the importance of marketing your third sector organisation? Or perhaps you want to know what comes next after you understand your audience. Well, we can help.
With over 40 years of experience working with Scottish social and community enterprises, as well as community organisations and development trusts, our team of business advisers can help you take your marketing to the next level. Get in touch with us today using the form below for free support.
