How To Find Your Target Audience and Why It Matters So Much
Last year, 85% of blog traffic came from organic searches. However, most businesses miss these benefits by not appealing to a target audience.
How do you avoid others’ mistakes and reap the rewards of target audiences? Learn how to find your target audience by identifying potential customers and then how to use this information in a way that really matters.
Keep reading to learn:
What Is a Target Audience?
While you may have heard the term before, few actually know what a target audience is. Some may say their audience is ”whoever wants to buy my product,” and others may throw out a group of people like “teachers” or “New Yorkers.” But none of these are actually fulfilling the requirements of a target audience.
A target audience is a specific group of people with similar demographic information that has a high overall interest in your product. This isn’t meant to exclude anyone from buying your product. Instead, it’s about understanding where marketing efforts should focus.
By learning how to find your target audience, you can tailor product designs and marketing campaigns to best suit the group of people who are most likely to buy your product.
How To Find Your Target Audience
1. Start with current customers.
2. Study your competitors’ audience.
3. Identify product benefits.
4. Create an audience persona from your marketing strategy.
5. Keep improving with Google Analytics.
1. Start With Current Customers
Analyzing your existing customer base is a key element to any market research, and for good reason. Information from previous purchases can tell you about buyer needs, key demographics, and the ideal marketing strategy moving forward.
Start with the people who already purchased your product and try to find similar demographic data. Scour your email lists, social media followers, and blog post subscribers for your entire audience. If you don’t already have buyer metrics available, you can get feedback from customers in a few different ways, including surveys and interviews.
2. Study Your Competitors’ Audience
Try to answer the following:
- How are my competitors selling products?
- What social media platforms do they rely on?
- What needs do they appeal to?
- What do these things say about my competitions’ target audience?
The answers to these questions will help you know how to find your target audience.
3. Identify Product Benefits
Listing the benefits of your products identifies your target audience’s values. This empowers you to appeal to consumer needs and find your target audience. But before we get into how to use benefits, let’s distinguish features versus benefits.
Features are simply attributes describing what your product can do. Benefits are the ways that a product or feature can improve a customer’s life. For example, a car may feature rear cameras and side sensors, but the listed benefits of the car include increased safety.
To determine your target audience’s needs, make a list of all the ways customers benefit from using your products, starting with the most important. Then, analyze this list in the mind of the consumer. Think about what needs must exist for consumers to want these benefits, and what values go along with these needs.
This analysis is the basis for identifying your target audience’s values.
4. Create an Audience Persona From Your Marketing Strategy
A buyer persona is an illustration of your ideal customer. Buyer personas let you hone in on customer needs and pain points to create a marketing message that will target new customers effectively.
As an example, a buyer persona might sound like, “Amiable Aimee is a stay-at-home mom who likes finding inexpensive ways to decorate her home and make her life easier. She is creative and fun.”
To create a customer persona, look at the information you have gathered based on your existing marketing strategy. Try to identify a few key characteristics. These traits should speak about your ideal customer’s motivations and behavior.
Picture this person in your mind:
- Where do they live?
- What is their marital status?
- What is a likely job title or income level?
- What type of content do they prefer?
These questions will help you make your first persona.
5. Keep Improving With Google Analytics
Once you know how to find your target audience, it’s important to support the description with data. Beginners can use Google Analytics for free, but a paid premium service is also available. Google Analytics is a great way to know your audience as it continues to evolve.
The program uses machine learning to track advertising investment returns. You can figure out whether your target persona is currently receiving most of your marketing attention. To get started refining your intended audience with this service, check out our guide on Google analytics for email marketing.
There are also many analytics tools out there besides Google. If you feel ready to expand analytics tracking, one of these seven ecommerce analytics tools will further clarify your target market.
Why Does the Target Audience Matter?
Now that you’ve been able to define your target audience, how can you use it? Whether you’re looking to streamline marketing strategies or raise your return on investment (ROI), knowing how to find your target audience will help. Below are some of the key ways that a target market improves your business.
Better KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are how most companies measure success. When you have a target audience, you can adjust your KPIs to create more realistic and actionable goals. Measuring the growth of a specific audience will ensure that money is being spent in the most efficient way and marketing campaigns are directed appropriately.
For example, let’s say audience research has indicated that white female millennials are in your target audience. Knowing that this group uses social networks like TikTok and Instagram rather than LinkedIn or Facebook pages, you may want to fit your digital marketing campaign around these social media platforms.
Focused Product Research
Knowing who is buying your product will make it easier to conduct focused product research on what people want to buy.
This is where knowing the values of your target customers really becomes important. Product research that is based on a target audience’s needs can be much more effective than research without this information.
Write Better Product Descriptions
Writing a product description can be tough. Enter your target audience.
Knowing your ideal customer makes it possible to create a product description that specifically caters to this type of individual.
Final Thoughts: How To Find Your Target Audience and Why It Matters So Much
Having audience insights is crucial to improving business. Knowing how to find your target audience can lead to:
- Higher ROI.
- Effective marketing campaigns.
- Greater customer retention.
- More focused goal setting.
- Better social media marketing.
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