How to Identify Your Target Audience

1 June 2022

Figuring out who your target audience is is essential for any digital marketing campaign. You need to know who you’re talking to before you write any ads or produce any website content. Proper identification lets you;

● Generate more leads

● Improve your conversion rate

● Create content that serves the needs of your audience

● Improve your brand image

Defining Target Audience

Your target audience is the people who are most likely to buy your product. They are individuals with a real need for what you sell and who will make purchases from you as long as their budgets allow.

Enterprises must gather information about their target audiences to direct their production processes. Understanding who you are selling to makes it easier to allocate resources to high-priority tasks, allowing you to use your inputs as effectively as possible.

How Businesses Characterise Their Target Audience

Obviously, companies can’t describe every person they sell to. Instead, they must find population characteristics that describe the “average” person looking to buy their products or services. Therefore, many break down their target audience along demographic lines, such as:

● Age

● Gender

● Job role

● Income

● Location

● Education level

More sophisticated approaches attempt to characterise people on psychological grounds. For instance, some firms look at things like purchasing behaviours, personality traits, and even ideologies.

How To Find Your Target Audience

To get a good grasp of who your target audience is, you’ll need to plan your research, coming at the problem from multiple angles. Here’s the step-by-step process you can follow:

Step 1: Research The Market

The first step is to learn more about the people already buying from you and your close competitors. In many cases, you can generate samples by simply going on Facebook and then recording relevant information about age, status and so on. If you have a following, that makes the task even easier. This way, you can determine the gender mix, average age, and location of the people who buy from you.

The more deeply you explore your audience, the more you will learn about their habits and spending patterns. Remember, most modern consumers, particularly millennials, prefer shopping online instead of in physical stores. As a business, you can use this information to change how they interact with your firm, perhaps by allowing them to book appointments via your website or chat with you in Messenger.

Step 2: Leverage Social Media

Sleuthing on social media can teach you basic facts about your audience, but Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are far more potent information-gathering tools than many business owners realise. For instance, running questionnaires and polls can teach you about the views, expectations and desires of your audience in a way that simply looking at their demographics cannot.

Step 3: Create A Customer Persona

The last step is to take all the information you collect and create a customer persona. This isn’t a real person but, instead, an amalgamation of all the average characteristics of your audience. For instance, if you sell baby products, your customer persona could be married women around the age of 30 with household incomes of £40,000 per year.