The ultimate guide to finding your target audience!
Updated: Dec 22, 2022
Your Ultimate Guide to Finding your Target Audience
Let's begin, if there’s one thing on every small business owner’s mind, it’s how to increase sales or get more customers. But finding the right marketing approach gets in the way of accomplishing these goals.
I'm sure the reason you're here is because you also find yourself having difficulty developing the perfect approach and often find yourself googling these questions as well, what is a Target Audience? How do you find your Target Audience? How do I know who my Target Audience is?
According to a recent study from Staples, more than a third of business owners have trouble designing effective marketing materials. Additionally, fifty percent of business owners don’t know how to reach prospective customers. The first step to resolving these marketing problems is identifying and getting to know your target audience. As a result of identifying and getting to know your target audience, in this guide we've laid out all the information you'll ever need to know about How, Who and What.
I began my web design business back in 2015, I use to research ways to start online businesses, how to find profitable products and most importantly who would be interested in purchasing these products. My niche then was drop-shipping mobile accessories, selling beauty products and selling clothes online. I made thousands of dollars in my first month because I knew how to find my target audience and most importantly offer a product or service people really want or need for that matter. With that being said, having seven years in the industry I have become quite the expert on Target Audiences for pretty much every niche out there.
Here I've compiled a guide of all the best tips on how to find your Target Audience.
What is a Target Audience?
Your target audience is the people who are likely to be most engaged with your content and self-identify as having an interest in your niche.
Knowing your Target Audience is vital to growing/ scaling any online business along with having certain systems in place to pull potential clients or customers in and also to keep them.
In other words, if you avoid developing this practice in finding your Target Audience, selling your product or service will be more difficult than you think. Often times, business ideas are based on who you are selling your product or service to. Below is all you need to know about how to find your target audience.
5 Major Keys to finding your Target Audience
How to utilize Customer Data
How to capture your Target Audience
5 Major Keys to finding your Target Audience
1. Get to know your current audience.
If you want to know who wants to purchase from you, the best place to look is at who is already buying from you. (That is assuming you already have some customers. If you’re just getting started, you can skip this step––we’ll get to you shortly!)
Gather demographic (age, gender, race, location, etc.) and psychographic (personality, values, interests, etc.) data about your current customers, including:
Age range: It can be hard to pinpoint the exact age of your customers, but don’t worry about getting too specific. Knowing their generation or even their stage of life (for example, if they’re college students, new parents, or retirees) can do the trick.
Location: The location of your target audience is especially important if you can only do business in a specific area, but it’s also good to note even if you have a national or global reach. Knowing what time zones, they’re in can help you schedule ads or shape your content posting schedule. Beyond that, there might be cultural differences that you can tailor your messaging to as well.
Spending power: Spending power is a little more nuanced than just “how much money your audience makes and has to spend.” It takes into account their decision-making ability too. For example, a stay-at-home mother might not have any salary of her own, but she might make all the purchasing decisions for day-to-day items in the home. Major financial concerns that could limit your audience’s spending (like student loans) should also come into play.
Concerns: When a customer buys from you, they’re trying to solve a problem. What challenges are you hoping to help them with? What are they concerned about? What are their biggest worries? What secondary issues might they face?
Values: Values help shape a lot of the decisions people make when they buy, both in their jobs and in their personal life. Understand your audience’s values, including how they like to spend their time, what they prioritize, and what they believe in, and you’ll be better equipped to shape your messaging for them.
2. Interview customers, prospects, and potential buyers. Just because there is a possibility, you don’t have comprehensive data about your customers yet.
Bad customers. If you find that a lot of your customers just aren’t what you want long term (maybe they don’t purchase more than once, they complain about the price, or maybe they’re just not a good fit for your products or services), don’t just discard them. Knowing your “bad” customers can help you understand what your ideal customer is not—and who you should avoid when you’re doing marketing.
Prospects. Prospects can have just as much insight into your target audience as your customers do. After all, these people are interested in purchasing from you, they just haven’t yet. Reach out to prospects to get to know them better—you may even get a head start on turning them into customers.
Referrals. If you’re just starting out and you don’t have any customers or prospects, or you’re trying to get a feel for a different market, referrals can help you out. Reach out to people in your network––past coworkers, your LinkedIn network, or friends and family––to see if anyone who fits your conceptualized target audience is willing to talk to you.
Third-party networks. Third-party networks (like UserTesting.com) send your website or app to a pre-identified group to help you gather feedback. While you don’t have complete control over the user recruitment process, it can still give you some solid feedback to get you started.
How to Utilize Customer Data
Analyze your competition’s social media followers. You and your competition will likely share some part of your audience. Competitive analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling combines all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
Look at your Facebook insights. Facebook is consistently among the top social media platforms for small businesses. Facebook Audience Insights is a tool that can help you specify and learn more about your target audience. You start by selecting different audience criteria such as location, age, interests, and behaviors. Then, you'll learn more things about them, including the size of your target market, and any trends in demographics or psychographics.
Three Ways to Capture Your Target Audience
One of the first ways to capture your target audience is by engaging in social listening. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s essentially when you monitor social media channels to hear what type of conversations they’re having regarding your brand, competitors, products and anything else closely related. It is essential as it can help you identify things your business is doing right or wrong as well as provide useful information about your brand that comes directly from your target audience’s mouth. Some effective ways tips for social listening include responding to complaints in a timely manner, being responsive to show you’re interested in your audience and listening to feedback to help you develop your feedback and products.
Another key SEO tip to consider is link building which is essential if you want to attract the right traffic. For those who are unaware, link building is essentially getting a hyperlink from another website to yours. It is important as search engines use these links to crawl the web and they can be used to discover new web pages as well as determine how well a page should rank in the results. If you ensure you strategically put your links on the right sites, then you’re likely to get traffic from your targeted audience.
Be empathetic with your customers/clients. When trying to capture your target audience, patience and listening are key. No matter how phenomenal your products and services are, without relaying them to your audience in a way that grabs their attention, it’s unlikely that you’ll get very far. For this reason, taking these tips as well as others into consideration may be a good idea. Hopefully, by doing so, you’ll find your business experiencing exponential growth and building lifelong relationships with your audience in no time.
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