The Best & Effective Ways of finding Target Audience
Whether you’re launching a new service or a new product - or you’re at any other stage of your business and marketing, you’ll always need to keep in mind, whom you’re doing it for? Is it for the entire population? Or just a portion of the population?
When you have the answers to these questions in your mind, you can do better business as you’ll have a goal to follow. This also makes the marketing journey easier.
That’s why, in this article, we’re gonna discuss your Target Audience and the best ways how you can identify and define them.
Who is your Target Audience?
Your target audience is the specific group of people that you want to target with your marketing campaigns with the intention of generating sales for your products and/or services. As such, these are the group of consumers that should see your ad campaigns.
These consumers are defined by their interests, demographics, and buying history. These can also include their age, location, education level, employment, and annual income level, among others.
Why should you define your Target Audience?
Understanding and drawing a distinct line that defines your target audience is very vital.
This information will define every marketing plan and strategy you execute. Selecting the right media is essential for achieving marketing ROI on your efforts. In addition to increasing ROI, understanding your target market allows you to build relationships and better communicate with consumers.
Some of the best & effective ways in finding your target audience
- Carry out your Market Research
Conducting market research will help you analyze all the aspects of the market. This will give you a better picture of how many competitors you have and also show you what gaps there are in the market, providing you an excellent opportunity to fill up those holes and find a unique selling proposition for your offer.
Market research even shows you what threats there are in the market — circumstances or events that can negatively impact you. This can help you plan for those threats and create plans to avoid or mitigate them.
You can perform a SWOT analysis, which identifies a business’s strengths and weaknesses, along with opportunities and threats.
- Track your Analytics
If your business has a website, is active on social media, or you’ve posted digital ads, chances are that your data will have analytics and metrics. There are many powerful tools to measure these statistics out there but the most expansive of them all is the Google Analytics tool.
With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see demographic details about your audience, as well as their interests. It offers extensive data about the users visiting your site. You can determine key insights such as what channels your audience is coming from or what type of content they’re engaging and connecting with the most, and thus make more data-driven decisions.
- Analyze your Competitors
You will, most probably, have many similar goals and overlapping target audiences with your competitors. And there's a lot you can learn from your competitors by taking notice of the things they do well by conducting basic market research.
You may also want to analyze their social media profiles. This will give you useful insights into - who interacts with their posts? what keywords are they using? what other accounts are they following? do they use influencer marketing to raise brand awareness?
You should also analyze what’s missing from their marketing and try to fill that gap with your product. Your marketing messages could be centered around the existing gap and how your product will solve the pain points.
- Create Personas
Creating personas is a great way to go down into the specific segments that make your target audience up. Personas determine the general demographics, needs, and personalities of your target customers. Personas are created based on surveys, data, social media engagements and any other information marketers can pull from to gain a more complete view of the buyers.
- Go Niche
Jake Hay of PopShorts states, “Define a group of people you want to reach with your marketing message. Really narrow down and define who you are trying to appeal to. It is impossible to target everyone, so the more specific you get, the better. Your website will gain much more attention if it solely appeals to your designated target audience.”
- Engage with Social Media audiences
Interacting with social media followers is very important as they're your ultimate audience. Ask your followers what they want to see. Make use of tools like Instagram Stories and replies to get your audiences’ responses for how/what you're doing. Whatever engagement you get, positive or negative, can influence how you attract more audience members.
The Closing Lines
These were the effective ways in which you can determine the target audience according to your business and the products and services that you provide. We hope that you found this article helpful and that these ways will come of good use to you!