7 Smart Ways to Identify Your Target Audience

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is made up of the people you are trying to reach or connect with. These are the people whose minds you want to change, who will become your customers, who will be impacted by your organization, and whom you hope to see embrace your values. Your goal? Get them on your side. Once they’re there, they’ll be more likely to take action on what you want them to do – buy your product or use your service.

It’s important to identify your target audience before you start to design anything — your website, product packaging, marketing materials or even your fundraising campaign. Why? Because that’s how you know what content to include, how attractive the design should be and whether or not it will appeal to the person you’re trying to reach. Everything else flows from there — It all starts with knowing who your target audience is and understanding their needs and interests.

Importance of Identifying Your Target Audience

To identify your target audience, it is important to sell your product or service faster than ever. Here are the benefits of it:

1. It helps you to be focused

If you know your target audience, you will have a clearer vision of what your product or service does and how to market it. You can also see if there are any changes in the market that may require updating your strategy.

2. It helps you find real customers

Identifying your target audience is not just about identifying the people who will buy from you. But also about finding potential partners in other industries or areas of expertise that may be interested in working with you as well as potential buyers for their products/services.

3. You can build a winning team

If you already have a clear idea of who your target audience is, then it will be easier to gather the right people to work with you. You can also get their inputs and feedback during the process of creating or developing your product or service.

4. It helps you to understand the competition

You can’t really create a strategy for selling your product if you don’t know what’s out there in the market that’s similar to yours, who’s using them, and why people would pay for them. Knowing who your competitors are will help you see what marketing methods they use and how effective these methods are in attracting customers.

5. Helps you to be innovative

Identifying your target audience will also help you to be innovative, because you can look for new ways to communicate with your audience, by choosing a different medium or channel. You may even consider going after the new market if you see an unmet need among your target audience.

6. Helps you to target your market segment

If your product or service is targeting a certain audience, you may be able to come up with different marketing strategies for different segments of the same market.

7. You can reach your ideal client

If your aim is to target a specific audience, then it will be easier for you to find ways how to reach out to them. You can also maximize your efforts in reaching out and converting more prospects because you already know what needs are important for them.

8. It keeps you focused

When you have many people who are trying to sell your product or service, it will be easy for them to get distracted from the main objective of selling in the first place. If you know your target audience, then they won’t be doing anything that they don’t want to do.

9. It helps you build trust in the marketplace

If your product or service is targeting a certain market, then it will help in building trust among potential customers. This will give them the confidence that if they are receiving value from your product/service, then this may result in a positive impact on their life and their lifestyle. They will also be more likely to share their positive experience with other people with similar needs.

10. Helps in your branding

Building a brand is not just about the name of your product or service; it’s also about identifying your target audience, building credibility and creating a strong relationship with them. It then follows that if you know who you’re creating a brand for, and what they value the most, you’ll be able to create products that cater to their needs and wants.

Smart Ways to Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in identifying your target audience is understanding who they are and where they live. There are many different factors that contribute to defining a person’s interests: age group, location, gender, finances, etc. But as a recently overwhelming process, let us find out the different steps to go about it.

1. Take a look at the social media handles

The first step in identifying who your target audience is is by taking a look at their social media accounts. The obvious places to get the data for your analysis on your audience are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A few minutes spent scrolling through a user’s account can give you an idea of their interests and hobbies. A quick glance will also tell you something about the person. For instance, many people send out a lot of notifications via Facebook, so if they are not sending any of their own posts at least they are not blocking other people to send notifications to them. It is easy to look through the profiles and find out who those people are just by seeing what they post publicly on these social media platforms.

2. Take your time understanding the users

Once you have identified your audience based on their social media connections, you can begin to understand them better by joining relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Be sure to use the search option to ask questions specific to your brand and industry so you can learn as much as possible about your target audience.

When looking at these posts and discussions in different groups, look for keywords that are relevant to your business. For example, “designer boots” might generate posts about shoes and boots if posted in a group related to footwear.

3. Get connected with your target audience online

The next step is to integrate the data you find through your research into a persona of an individual in your targeted audience. For this to happen, you will need a good understanding of how people use social media and how they communicate through Twitter and Facebook.

For start-up businesses or founders, this can be a particularly difficult task as they may not have solid connections yet. As such, it is often best to engage with potential customers prior to developing a full campaign around them. Social media tools like Hootsuite make it easy for you to schedule posts and direct messages for timed events at set times; you might even want to dedicate an entire account just for this kind of marketing activity.

4. Use the right tools to target your audience

To understand your target audience better and to get them to know you, you need a few tools that will help you in this regard. A good example is Google Analytics, which helps marketers track their target audience. They can use Analytics to find out what sites their audience spends time online, whether they read blogs or follow influencers, and other metrics that can potentially help them in marketing campaigns.

Marketers might also want to consider using a platform like AeroLeads for their email marketing campaign. This kind of service allows users to send mass emails and even track the success of their campaigns.

5. Get an overview of your target audience

While the aforementioned steps will help the brand or business in getting to know its target audience, it is equally important for users to know about themselves and the brand. The reason for this is simple: if there is no connection between you and your customers, they cannot relate to you. Google Analytics can help users understand more about their traffic and how they landed on their site, what browsers they are using and where they are from.

Users should also try to incorporate a quiz based on different interests into their website or landing page so that potential customers can learn more about themselves by taking a quick test.

6. Understand your target audience’s general likes and dislikes

The idea behind understanding these interests is to help businesses come up with a better marketing campaign that will appeal to the customers. For this to happen, it is important for a person to understand their prospective customer as well as possible. This can be done by knowing their needs and wants in relation to your business or brand.

7. Create a customized offer

One of the best ways to increase brand awareness is by creating a special offer that is tailored to your target audience. For instance, if you want to attract millennial customers with young children, you can offer them a package that will cater to their needs. This can be quite tricky since the amount of education required for each person varies from one professional to another.

The best way to do this is by placing ads on shares that have gained traction on sites where your target audience spends time on social media. In this case, it is ideal to make an ad campaign that focuses on specific keywords associated with your services and products.

8. Emphasise your brand’s USP

A USP is an acronym for Unique Selling Proposition. A business needs to figure out its unique selling proposition in order to market and communicate better with customers, prospective customers, influencers, and other stakeholders. To do this, you need to formulate a strategy that will help you identify and define your unique selling point(s).

This is achieved by understanding how you are different from the competition in the eyes of your target audience. If there are no competitors in the market for what you want to offer them, make sure you identify what sets you apart from others who might enter the market after some time.

9. Overcome the competition’s USP

Once you have defined your USP, it is time to measure how far you are from your competitors in this aspect. To understand this, it is best to conduct a SWOT analysis by stating which strengths and weaknesses your business has.

Then compare them to the capabilities of other businesses that are facing similar problems. For example, if you want to make a business card for people who are starting out in their career and need help with getting a job in the new year, you can come up with one that will stand out from others. This kind of card should have information about the organization on it, its mission statement, and contacts for them.

10. Attractively market your product and company

The last phase of the marketing campaign is to attract attention to your business. It is important to ensure that you are able to identify the best channels for your marketing efforts. One great way to do this is by partnering with influencers, people who have a great reach but don’t necessarily have a large number of followers. This can help you leverage their influence so that people will be more likely to use your product or service.

11. Create an impact that you can measure

One of the things businesses need to ensure is that they assess the results of their marketing campaigns. This is a very important part of the process because it helps businesses identify where they are going wrong in the process and makes necessary adjustments to achieve better results in the future. Businesses can use various metrics to know how well their marketing activities have been able to meet their targets.

Conclusion

Marketing campaigns require a lot of work and time to be able to produce the best results. However, following the steps above will help you achieve more with less effort in your marketing campaign. Most of these strategies and tactics can be applied across industries. The goal however is for brands to truly understand their target market through discovering what they want, what their needs are and how your brand can provide them with a solution.