How to Find Your Target Audience

Source: Oleksandr P. via. Pexels

What is the difference between target market and target audience?

The terms "target market" and "target audience" are different. Your “target market” refers to the broader group of potential customers that might purchase your product or service based on demographics and industry segments.

In contrast, your "target audience" is a more specific subset of your target market, defined by their unique characteristics, interests, and behaviors. For example, a brand like Apple targets tech enthusiasts as their target market but focuses on millennials and Gen Z for its marketing campaigns (target audience).

When brands understand this distinction, they can create tailored content that resonates with their specific audience and drive engagement and conversions effectively.

5 Practical Steps to Identify Your Target Audience

Step 1: Understand Your Product or Service

The first step to determining your target audience is to have a deep understanding of your product's unique selling points, its features and benefits. Without this knowledge, businesses lack the clarity to communicate the value of their product or service effectively to their identified potential customers.

That being said, here are questions to help you understand your product and its connection with your prospective audience:

• What need does my product fulfill?
• Who benefits most from it?

So, by discovering their target customers, businesses should be able to spot their audience’s pain points. This way, they can position their products as solutions to the problem their audience is experiencing.

Step 2: Conduct Market Research

Knowing your product or service is one step toward finding your target audience. But you need to conduct market research to gain valuable insights that help you map out effective marketing strategies for your business.

There are various methods to conduct market research including:

• Surveys and Questionnaires

This strategy employs concise surveys to gather data from potential customers. With them, you uncover your potential customers’ preferences and pain points.

• Interviews and Focus Groups

This is another form of quality research that helps you probe deeper into your customer motivations. Unlike questionnaires or surveys, interviews give you the privilege of face-to-face interaction with your prospects and reveal hidden nuances that surveys might miss.

• Competitor Analysis

As businesses strive to identify their target customers, they should remember that they've got some competitors to contend with. And that's why it's critical to study your competitors to understand their audience. That way, you can identify gaps in their approach that you can exploit to attract ideal customers for your business.

• Utilizing Online Tools

Data is one thing many businesses pay for because it informs their strategies. That's why employing tools like Google Trends, social media analytics, and industry reports is critical. No doubt, they offer real-time data.

Step 3: Create Customer Personas

Customer personas are fictional profiles you create based on actual data and insights, representing your ideal customers.

A customer persona helps your brand understand your customers and foster targeted marketing efforts. This way, you ensure relevance and resonance in your messaging and content.

How to Create a Persona

1. Start with Demographic Information

Part of determining your target audience is gathering data on age, gender, income, and education. These kinds of data are what you can call demographic information or data. For example, a tech company might identify its customer persona as a 30-40-year-old male with a bachelor's degree and a household income of $80,000.

2. Pay attention to Psychographic Information

Beyond taking note of your potential customers’ demographic data, you can take a step forward to examine their psychographic information. This involves learning about their interests, values, lifestyles, and behavior patterns.

For example, a tech brand might have a typical customer persona, including psychographic information. Thus, you could hear something like this:

“A 20-30 year-old app developer with a love for video games and tech innovation. He looks for cutting-edge gadgets and spends hours on forums discussing the latest tech trends.”

Now, this takes us to the subject that business owners should understand while trying to create excellent customer personas.

Elements of your target audience

Looking at the example above, one might think it lacks detail however it has the fundamental elements of a business’ target audience. That is because it involves:

• Age –20-30 years-old (demographic information)
• Ideal Customer's Interests (Psychographics) —"love for video games and tech innovation"
• Behavioral Patterns — "looks for cutting-edge gadgets and spends hours on forums discussing the latest tech trends"

The fun part is that brands like Nike understand these elements so well. For example, as a brand, Nike doesn't just sell shoes; they sell a lifestyle. If you’ve observed most of their campaigns, you’ll realize that they resonate with athletes' aspirations.

More often than not, these campaigns draw in diverse demographics unified by the pursuit of excellence. In the end, when brands grasp these elements, they can create tailored experiences, cultivate trust, and strengthen customer loyalty

Step 4: Engage with Your Audience

Engagement is the heartbeat of effective marketing. That’s why successful brands actively engage with their customers. Of course, they do this by adopting strategic channels to identify their target audience.

Here are the ways they do this (you can employ them too!):

- Utilize Social Media:

Social media platforms are goldmines for audience interaction. Brands like Glossier thrive by creating dialogues on social media, especially on Instagram. They respond to comments and share user-generated content.

Two-way communication builds trust and also uncovers insights about customer preferences.

- Solicit feedback

Getting direct feedback from your audience is a goldmine for your business. They help you refine your products, services, and mode of operation to satisfy your customers. But the real question is, how do you make this happen?

Of course, you can use methods like surveys, polls, or perhaps ask questions in your posts. A typical example of a brand that exemplifies this is Starbucks. When it launched “My Starbucks Idea” in 2011, it invited customers and collected over 190,000 consumer suggestions. And by 2021, they had implemented 277 innovations.

- Build a Community

Successful brands understand that engagement isn't a one-off exercise, so they invest immense efforts into community building. This involves nurturing a sense of community by establishing environments that encourage interaction. Consider Facebook or Linkedin groups or forums where customers can share experiences, ask questions, and connect over shared interests.

For instance, Peloton has built a thriving community of fitness enthusiasts who motivate each other. Through this, Peloton reinforces its brand loyalty while gathering insights about the desires of its target audience.

That’s to tell you that every interaction with your audience is an opportunity to connect deeper with them. So you can turn your audience into your biggest advocates by genuinely engaging, listening actively, and fostering community.

Step 5: Test and Adjust Your Strategy

The task of effectively identifying your target audience is not a one-off task. That's why businesses should continuously test and adjust their marketing strategies.

One of the most powerful tools at your disposal to do that as a business owner is A/B testing. It involves creating two versions of a campaign— and that could be email, ad copy, or landing pages. The goal is to help pinpoint what resonates most with your audience.

For example, a clothing brand may test two diverse headlines for a promotional email. Certainly, this method enables them to assess metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. This way, they know which email is more effective and better captivates and resonates with your audience.

Effective Tools to find your target audience

Every form of effective content marketing depends on finding your target audience. While that's true, business owners can't identify, understand, and engage with their ideal customers when they lack the right tools. Some of these tools include:

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that serves as a powerhouse and helps business brands reveal demographics, interests, and geographic data. The fun part is these insights help business owners tailor their content and marketing strategies.

2. Social Media Insights

As a business struggling to find your target audience on social media, you should pay attention to analytical insights. Fascinatingly, platforms like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and others offer detailed analytics. These data reveal those engaging with your content, your audience’s preferences, and how to create more resonant messaging.

3. Surveys and Polls

As said, every business should know their audience's pain points, preferences, and content consumption habits. Fortunately, surveys and polls are an excellent way to gather this information, especially using tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms.

4. Keyword Research Tools

Your audience is part of the billions of Internet users that use search engines like Google to search for things. That’s why it’s important to understand what they’re looking for so you can produce content that addresses their questions and satisfies their needs. And that's where keyword research tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs come in handy.

Conclusion

We looked at the practical steps any business owner can take to figure out your target audience online. These strategies are relevant to any business, no matter the industry. The key is to take action and implement them to help your business save time, money, and resources that might otherwise be wasted on poor targeting.