How to Find Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience should be the first and most important step to your marketing strategy. It is very hard to create a successful campaign without first knowing who you are creating that campaign for. Therefore, your target audience will be the foundation for your campaigns, and will help you to focus your marketing efforts, dollars, and messaging. Do you know who your ideal customer is? We’re here to help you figure it out! Here are our tips for properly defining your target audience so that you can tailor your marketing efforts efficiently and powerfully.

1) Analyze Your Current Customer Base

The first step in defining your target audience is to determine who your current customers are. Analyzing the characteristics, interests, and buying intentions of those who are already engaging with your brand will help you to establish the type of consumers that would benefit from your business. What are their demographics? Interests? Personality Types? It is very likely that people similar to them will also be interested in your product/service. You can gather information about your current customer base by analyzing your social media channels, distributing customer surveys, and looking at customer reviews.

2) Conduct Market and Competitor Research

Conduct market research to determine where there are gaps within your industry and how your brand can fill those missing pieces. You should also identify industry trends, who your competitors are targeting, who their current customers are, and how your competitors are focusing their marketing efforts. That way, you can capitalize on those gaps and hone in on the unique value of your product/service. By leveraging your product/service as a brand that provides added value within your industry, as well as finding a niche market that your competitors may be overlooking, you can establish a competitive advantage for your brand.

3) Understand Your Products/Services

You must first have a good understanding of your product/service along with its benefits in order for you to initially market your brand. To do so, we recommend beginning with a list that consists of three categories:

  1. Features
  2. Benefits of Each Feature
  3. Who Has a Need That Your Benefit Will Fulfill?

That way, you can determine exactly what your product/service does, how it benefits consumers, and who your prospective customers will be.

4) Know How You Can Help Your Consumers

Once you have established the benefits of your product/service, it is important to know how it can help your consumers and why they should go ahead and purchase. By showcasing the ways in which your product/service provides real value, and how it can make the lives of your consumers better/easier, prospective customers will be more inclined to purchase from your business.

5) Create Personas

Creating personas is a vital step in defining your target audience. Personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customers including demographics, personal characteristics, purchasing power, lifestyle, interests, and professional information. They help you to really refine your audience and focus your time on qualified prospects. By creating personas and having a strong understanding of your ideal customers, you can tailor your content, messaging, and campaigns to meet the specific needs, behaviours, and concerns of your target audience. We recommend that you develop between three to five personas for your brand, and as a result, you will be able to attract high value leads who will likely turn into conversions.

6) Know Who Your Target Audience Isn’t

When defining your target audience, it is also important to understand who your target audience isn’t. There will be people who are close to your target audience, however, their purchase intentions may not align with your brand. Be as specific as possible when determining who is and isn’t your target audience. Is your target demographic men or men between the ages of 20 and 50? Knowing this information will guide your team in implementing campaigns that are well within your target audience, as well as help to avoid spending marketing dollars on segments that won’t yield returns.

7) Use the Tools Available to You

There are a variety of tools that you can use to obtain data about users visiting your website, engaging with your social media channels, and searching your brand. This information is extremely valuable as it provides key insights including what channels your target audience is coming from and what type of content they are engaging and connecting with the most. This will in turn allow you to make data-driven decisions when executing your marketing campaigns. Some powerful tools that you can utilize include Google Analytics, Iconoquare, and SEMrush.

8) Evaluate and Revise

Don’t forget to continuously evaluate and revise your target audience. As you gather more data and information about your customers, your understanding of your target audience will become more and more accurate. Based on this every-growing information, you should be constantly optimizing your personas and target audience to attain the best results.

We’re Here to Help!

We hope these tips help you better define your target audience and create marketing campaigns that will turn prospective customers into leads and leads into conversions. Not sure how to properly implement these tips into actionable items? Our copywriting, social media, and branding services can assist you in defining a target audience that will be empowered to purchase from your brand. We will also create copy and content, build a strong online presence, and develop a brand that really resonates with your target audience. We want to help you develop a competitive advantage for your brand so that you can attract and retain high quality consumers. Fill out our contact form, give us a call at (519-837-8333, or send us an email at info@baileycreative.ca to get started!

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