Audience & positioning
Your weakest area
Audience & positioning
You scored lowest here. That usually means people are finding you, and the wrong ones are the ones who stick around.
What it looks like when it’s broken
You hear some version of these on repeat.
What makes this one tricky is that most teams already sense the wrong audience is reaching their site. They just can’t pinpoint why.
Why it happens
Nobody has decided exactly who the company is for, so the marketing is aimed at a big crowd and ends up missing everyone.
The usual explanation is a traffic problem or a funnel problem. The real cause sits further upstream, and it tends to show up in one of four ways.
Broad content
Content written for a large, general crowd, so it resonates with nobody in particular.
Wrong channels
Posting consistently on platforms your target buyers rarely use to make decisions.
Volume over targeting
Paying for reach without focused targeting. Traffic goes up and conversions stay flat.
Generic messaging
Copy that never speaks directly to the people who actually want what you offer.
What good looks like
Without a defined audience
Copy that tries to tell readers what they feel. Content written for someone ready to buy, shown to someone who has never heard of you.
With a defined audience
Specific, personal, and succinct. It reflects what your buyer already knows and says clearly what sets you apart.
Good targeting reaches the right person at the right point in their buying journey. That is the whole job.
The first move
Define your ideal customer profile and the specific problems they face at the moment they need what you offer.
Be as specific as you can, and do not worry about leaving anyone out. Focus on one person. You will still hear from people outside that profile. The difference is that the people you actually want will recognize themselves right away.
One person. The problem they have. The moment they need you.
How you’ll know it’s working
The quality of your leads improves first. More of the leads that come in move through to a sale.
Traffic may drop at first, and that is fine. Fewer of the wrong visitors and more of the right ones adds up to more sales over time.
What this looked like for one client
I worked with a company that knew its primary audience well. The gap was everyone else involved in the buying decision. Their content spoke to one person, and the rest of the buying journey had nothing written for it.
We built personas for everyone in their ideal customer profile and a separate email journey for each one, with trigger-based click-throughs that routed a lead to sales as soon as their actions showed they were ready.
We also traced a large volume of irrelevant traffic back to its source. It was coming from Facebook, where they were posting heavily and where hardly any of their target buyers make purchasing decisions.
Conversion rate improved substantially while lead volume fell. Fewer leads, and more of them buying.
Where this sits
Audience sits at the root of the system alongside goals. When it is vague, the damage spreads.
Dashed areas are not directly affected by this one.
You cannot decide which audiences and campaigns to prioritize when nobody has agreed who you are targeting.
There is no answer to what you create or who it is for. Content that tries to appeal to everyone reaches no one.
Without a defined audience, there is no clear answer to which leads should be prioritized.
You cannot see which personas convert better than others if the personas were never defined.
Some personas need to reach sales sooner than others. Without them, nobody knows when a lead should change hands.
Fix the audience and those five get sharper. Leave it vague and every downstream fix is aimed at the wrong person.
Your weakest area is where to start. It is not the whole picture.
The Scorecard rates eight areas because they fail together. You scored lowest here, but there are often others already under strain. Worth reading the neighbors before you decide where to spend the next quarter.
Click any highlighted area to read it.
- Goals & prioritiesRead →
- Audience & positioning · You are here
- Content & conversionRead →
- CRM & handoffsRead →
- Reporting & attributionRead →
- People & ownershipRead →
- Tools & dataRead →
- AI useRead →
Want someone to look at the whole system?
The Scorecard tells you where it hurts. A Diagnostic tells you why, and what order to fix it in. I look at your setup properly and give you a sequenced plan rather than eight separate problems.