While pursuing my MBA, I experienced one of those moments wherein you hear someone put a name to a concept you know about but have not labeled as such. When you share the other person's vision of how to make sense of an abstract idea, you feel the fog lift and the picture comes into view. This is how I felt when I learned about WIIFM.
The aforementioned fog-clearing professor turned the initialism into an acronym by pronouncing the abbreviation as "whiff-im" (similar vowel sounds as rhythm). WIIFM stands for What's In It For Me (some of you may be more familiar with WIIFY - what's in it for you). WIIFM works because it is easy to remember, and it makes the abstract idea of understanding your audience a bit more concrete by turning it into a guiding question that is easily remembered and applied. There are plenty of more robust audience-centric frameworks, but WIIFM gets at the heart of a problem quickly: What's in it for me? If you can answer that question effectively and concisely, then you know the value audience members will place on your product or service. And knowing the benefit the audience sees in your offering is a guiding principle that will support or drive (depending on your strategy) your marketing, communication, and storytelling efforts.
Understanding your audience is critical to predicting successful business outcomes. There are many ways to look at this; let's begin by considering a few.
Approach #1: Know your audience first, then craft your strategy
If there is a particular audience segment you want to reach, you can start with audience identification and analysis, then use that strategic information to drive your decisions around product development, packaging, pricing, messaging, promotions, and more.
For example, if you are a teacher, you know the age and education level of your students. You have an idea of the topics you will cover, but the more you know about how your audience dissects, interprets, and uses information, the more effective your subsequent strategy will be. A ninth grade teacher might teach Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury differently than an adult book club would analyze it; the topic is the same, but the strategy and execution will change based on the audience.
Approach #2: Craft your strategy first, then identify your target audience
If you want to create a product based on a market gap or an invention you came up with, you may want to strategize around developing the product before testing it on different users and using that data to identify your audience. If your product is widely used across demographics or audience segments, this may apply to you. If you are working on a passion project that means a lot to you, this may describe you; you know what you want to put out there, and you have a clear product idea and brand voice, but you don't yet know who will respond to it. This probably happens most often with newer entrepreneurs who begin with an idea, build a minimum viable product, then get the prototype in front of focus groups and test users (in a beta phase) to see who finds value in it; that data will dictate who the audience is. Then, the marketing can follow. Essentially, here, the product leads, then the audience is formed, then the marketing responds.
If you create jewelry, your target audience may change based on the channel or even time of year -- for example, you may find that men buy more jewelry in February for Valentine's Day, women buy more jewelry with disposable income during non-holiday times, and both purchase jewelry around the winter holidays like Christmas. The product may also determine the audience -- men buy more engagement rings than women. In this case, the target audience changes based on the product line.
The One Consensus: Pay Attention to Your Audience
There are many different views on when to identify your audience and how important your audience should be to your business plan. Inventors of new tech products may not know their audience from the onset because they are basing their product on an idea and want the data to show them who their audience is (and it may be everyone, as may be the case with cell phones in today's society). Others swear your business will never succeed unless you understand your audience and gear your branding and marketing to this particular audience segment from day one. Your audience is the one determining the benefit of your products, engaging with your brand, and deciding to purchase or not to purchase. They also carry the power of word of mouth, as well as the added digital layer of reviews or comments on social media.
Either way, there is no denying how important your audience is. And when your audience members engage with your marketing or consider buying your product, they will be wondering to themselves, "What's in it for me?" You will want to ensure the answer is clear -- they should be able to easily identify the value your offering provides. That way, they will be more inclined to move through the sales funnel and purchase your product. In other words, if there's nothing in it for your audience, there's no reason for them to buy your product. And how can you sustain a business without revenue?
Bonus: Empathy Matters
Taking a page from the Design Thinking handbook, empathizing with your audience members and putting yourself in their shoes will allow you to anticipate their needs, behaviors, reactions, and preferred method of interacting with your product. Starting at the highest level then gradually digging deeper, you will benefit from exploring their universe, feelings, interests, pain points, and behaviors, then whittling your exploration down to apply more specifically to their engagement with your brand and product. Customer journey mapping can also help at this stage, as understanding each touchpoint from the audience's perspective will help you refine your offering to be more valuable for your target audience - which, at the end of the day, is of paramount importance.
In Summary...
Understanding your audience -- and using those learnings in your marketing and business building -- means you are providing value to those who a) need it and b) agree that your offering is valuable to them (notice how important the audience's perception and perspective is). You are filling someone's gap, fulfilling someone's needs, or giving someone a benefit that they are seeking. When you are able to say this about your product or business, you have achieved a customer-centric model that provides clear value to those who seek it and hopefully provides a steady income stream to enable your operations to continue. Thus, you enter a productive cycle that identifies an audience need and provides that need with a product or offering in a dynamic manner. And the more agile you are, the more readily you will be able to adjust to changes in the market, environment, and audience preference.

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