After reading this blog, when you are asked, “Who is your target audience? Who do you want to reach?”, please don’t answer that question with “Christians.”

With a faith-based product, cause or service, can’t I just target Christians?  That answer is most often no.  The faith-based market reaches many different types of Christians including different beliefs such as Catholic or Protestant, denominational or non-denom, charismatic or non-charismatic, and of course the “normal” demographic categories such as income, region of the country, ethnicities, and age ranges.  There is little likelihood that a Christian pastor in his fifties is going to be interested in the same thing that a Christian latina teenager will be, and ZERO chance that the same advertising message would appeal to both.

Many clients think that the more people they reach, the better.  At FrontGate, our 15+ years of experience confirms that this approach will not create a successful campaign.  Though it is true that a campaign can interest a variety of different audiences and buyers, it’s important to do the research to narrow your Christian target audience down to probably at most 2 or 3 key groups in order to craft impactful messaging and to maximize the effectiveness of your limited time and budget.

Here are the three reasons to narrow the definition of your Christian target audience:

Capture Your Audience’s Attention

The average attention span these days is approximately 8 seconds and that’s after getting over the hump of catching viewers’ attention in the first place.  How will you be able to capture a potential client’s attention for long enough to get them to invest in your campaign while they are targeted by millions of pieces of content daily?  The best way to strategically target their interest is by showing them something they’re already interested in.   This will allow you to shape your campaign into a focused game plan rather than wasting time trying to sell to people that aren’t within the target audience group.   Here’s an example from the hospitality industry:  would you want to advertise your butcher’s cleaver to a baker?  Not unless he’s planning for a career change!  Trying to sell a cleaver to a baker is a waste of your time and money, yet both are in the hospitality industry.  The same is true for advertising to Christians.

Gain Insight to Needs & Motivations of Customers

The goal is to narrow down to 2-3 key groups of people you can target.  The importance of taking a deeper look to consider the motivation and needs of a client is simple… It’s building that relationship to know how to better speak to the customer’s desires as we talked about previously regarding the baker vs the butcher scenario.  While looking at needs and motivation of the customer, we can better identify the different types of buyers who might be a potential client within your campaign.  Instead of just looking at personal interest, who actually makes or influences the buying decision.  From there we can profile their needs, problems, spending, and other variables to understand what kind of campaign to test with that target audience, making your marketing strategy much more effective.

Create an Impactful Campaign Pitch

After creating a profile of your top target audiences, you will have figured out ‘who’ you’re pitching and ‘why’ they’re interested.  Then it’s time to create ‘what’ communication we want them to receive from us, decide ‘what’ action we want them to take, and ‘where’ to showcase your product, cause or service to your potential customer.  Where is your audience likely to buy?  What would visually entice them to continue to read?  What websites are they visiting? Where are they going on a day to day basis?  What kind of verbiage does your audience find easy to listen to?  These are the kinds of questions to ask after knowing your target audiences.  When you allow yourself to know your market the best as possible which not only makes your voice louder to those clients but creates a foundational relationship with your client since they feel understood and you both share the common interest.

Though it might seem like a lot of work and research in order to narrow down your target audiences, it definitely pays you back with success in terms of conversions and budget.

Our Free Audience Tool

We have a free tool right here on our site that will help you narrow down to key sites and events reaching Christian audiences.  Start at the top of our site by clicking on Advertising, and then select the Audiences subchannel (or you can just click here on Audiences.)  By selecting from the list of most requested target audiences presented there, you’ll be able to narrow down to only the digital and events that reach that target audience.  From there, you can dive into each individual media kit to review specific opportunities.

Using the Audiences channel on our website enables you to zero in on key opportunities based on our most requested target audiences that clients have asked to reach time and time again.

FrontGate is the home of leading Christian media outlets with faith-based advertising and sponsorship opportunities to help you reach maximum potential, and we are more than just a leading Christian Web & Event Network.  We are Engagement Specialists; trained marketers here to help you achieve your desired goals, whether you are marketing a movie, book or album launch; an event, a donor development campaign, the launch of a new service, building your email or social following, site traffic, app downloads; and more. Contact us for more information.