Through the Needle's Eye: How to Find Your Target Audience Without Missing a Beat
You’ve probably heard about this popular joke: Three men of the cloth (a priest, a pastor and a rabbi) met up at a bar. They started arguing over who’s the best at what they do. They agreed to go out alone into the woods and convert a bear to their respective religion to prove who’s the best.
They met up a few days later, and they are all successful, except the rabbi. He had a broken arm, a fractured collarbone and several injuries. He looked at them and said, “You know what, looking back… maybe I shouldn’t have started with a circumcision.”
Okay, I am sorry, that is an unbearable joke.
But anyway, as far-fetched as this comparison may seem, it represents you and your competitors’ marketing to convert people to customers.
In the more extended version of this joke (of course, it’s not original. Nothing on the internet ever is), you can understand that unlike the other two, the rabbi failed because he didn’t consider who his target was, so he didn’t use the right approach with his marketing messages.
That is why you should find your target audience and understand them. Once you do, you’ll be able to take all their details into account and speak to them personally, increasing their likelihood of converting them to paying customers.
The other advantages of keeping your audience in mind when coming up with a marketing plan and creating your marketing materials include:
- You’ll attract higher quality leads
- You’ll foster customer loyalty and longer-lasting relationships
- You’ll have more effective marketing spending
- You’ll increase your ROI
- You'll gradually create a high-converting sales funnel
- You’ll get the most out of your marketing efforts
- You’ll increase chances of running a marketing campaign successfully
But how do you find them? As a quick primer, here's a quick guide on the definition of target audience.
Relevant Read:
How to Reach Your Target Audience Through Content
TOFU, MOFU, BOFU: What They Are and What They Mean for Your Business
1. Start With Your Current Customers
The first step to identifying who you’ll target is understanding your current customers. Once you know what your client base looks like, you can take the appropriate measures to attract and connect with your online target audience.
Run an RFM market segmentation (recency, frequency, and monetary value) or any similar deep dive analysis on your current real customers, then categorize them based on their common characteristics. It can help you pinpoint the right customer audience to target for a higher ROI.
If you are starting a new venture or going after a new business, analyzing your existing customers gives you insight into how they fit with the new target customers to include them among your targets.
You could have enough audience data to fully understand your typical customer if you have a customer database from sources such as a CRM, customer purchase history, product and business reviews, or an email list.
2. Think in Terms of Benefits, Not Features
To find your target core audience, it would help if you think of your product or service as the solution to someone’s problem. Whose problem are you the solution for? Who has the problem? What is your solution?
To understand this, take your product or service, list all its features and qualities, and ask yourself, “who is likely to benefit from these features?”. When you understand the benefits of your offering, you will know who would get the most out of it. These are your ideal customers.
For example, if you sell baby carriers with back support, your target is expectant mothers who have back problems.
3. Collect Demographic and Psychographic Data
To better understand who to target, you need to collect their demographic details. There are several ways to collect this data from different sources.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for obtaining basic demographic details about your exact audience and their interests. It is the best tool to use if you already have a functioning website. You can access the audience demographic characteristics of your website’s traffic on your audience data dashboard so you can optimize your content to target their unique needs.
It can also give you valuable data such as your click-through rate, average time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rates.
Apart from Analytics menu, you can find information on your target audience using social platforms. Assuming you already have a social media presence (who doesn’t?), you can also collect data from people who are already following you and interacting with your posts as they’ve already shown an interest in your business.
Most major social media platforms have social media analytics tools, such as Facebook Business Suite, that business owners can use for social media audience research. They can help you collect data such as age range, marital status, income level, location, language, interests, challenges, and stage of life.
Through your audience’s social profiles, you can understand whether your content attracts the specific audience you want and what you can do to appeal to them through this demographic information. They’ll allow you to create the right type of content, be it educational content or video content, for your audience.
For efficiency, it would be best to first research which social channels your social media audience uses. This determines the marketing channels you should use. You can use several tools such as Hootsuite Insights, Keyhole.io, and Google Analytics, among others.
4. Use Data From Market Research Firms
Data from market research companies is invaluable if you would like a broad overview of people who use your products or services, and not just your niche market.It’ll allow you to make informed decisions.
However, most businesses cannot afford to hire market research firms to conduct research and studies on their specific audiences, but these firms usually sell or offer their reports for free.
You can use these reports to understand your target market better.
For instance, Gartner’s yearly marketing predictions and Nielsen’s free report on African Americans’ view on representation in marketing can help you understand the best marketing trends customers for different markets.
5. Study the Competition
You share audiences with your competition, and you most likely have the same overall goals. That is why you should look into what they are doing and who they are doing it to. This is valuable information, especially if they have been in the market longer than you because they already know your audience well.
You don’t even need their internal data and marketing strategies. You can learn enough through social listening and basic market research.
For example, you can look at their social media profiles. Who interacts with their posts? What are their keywords? Who is following them? Getting the answers to these questions will give you valuable insight into their target audience. You can then decide whether you would rather target a different audience or take your competition head-on by targeting the same people.
Some of the tools you can use to study your competition include Buzzsumo and Search streams.
6. Through Social Listening
Social listening is tracking social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand, industry, and products, then analyzing them for audience insights to discover your target audience.
You can learn what people are saying by monitoring relevant hashtags and keeping your eye on keywords without them even mentioning you. It helps you uncover various relevant hashtags that your audience uses, allowing you to understand further and refine your target audience. Use these hashtags and keyword mentions in your posts to increase your reach to more relevant active users.
As you monitor how people talk about subjects relevant to your business, look for pain points and topics they mention. You can join the conversation either as your business or using a personal account if need be. Do they want something new in your industry? What are they praising or putting down? This insight can then be channeled to create more personalized content.
Like collecting demographic data from social media target audience, it would be best to start social listening by researching which social channels your audience uses most.
7. Create Personas
Have you ever played the video game Sims? Creating a persona is similar to it. You start with a digital person without any detail, and then you create a detailed profile by adding personal characteristics.
These characteristics include:
- Work
- Job title
- Relationship status
- Family status
- Purchase intentions
- Spending power
- Content preferences
- Hobbies
- Friends
- Pain points
- Monthly income or income range
Base them on your marketing persona template if you have one. It is recommended that you develop a few marketing personas with fictional profiles instead of just one.
Creating a user persona allows you to drill down into the specifics of the audience segments that make up your target audience. The comprehensive profile is especially useful if you have a product that has a wide range of potential customers.
Customer Personas also prevent you from forgetting who you are writing for or creating content that doesn’t address their unique needs. And if your reader persona is closely aligned with your buyer persona (which it should be), you will be able to address their specific needs, increasing their likelihood of interacting with you and becoming loyal. For example, if your business product is baby carriers, and your persona “wants to find a carrier that doesn’t hurt them”, you can use the persona to think of content core that surrounds solving that challenge.
8. Using Customer Surveys
This is one of the simplest and one of the most effective because your data is not based on assumptions or derivations. A simple survey that, for example, finds out who the leads that convert to actual customers are can give you additional insights into which content you can create to turn your audience into prospects.
You can use several tools to create these surveys, and they are mostly free. Google Forms is a great starting place.
A one-on-one interview with your current customers could give you the insight you need if you have the means.
9. Continuously Revise
Your target audience from two years ago could not be the same today. And even if they are, several things could have changed, such as their preferred methods of solving their pain points, how they search for information, and the social media platforms they mostly use.
As such, you should constantly review your target audience and reader and buyer personas. Constantly revising them will enable you to always speak to them on a personal level and recommend the best ways to solve their pain points.
What’s Next after Finding Them?
Most people tend to gravitate towards content and businesses that speak to them on a personal level, especially in this current world where they are bombarded by content left, right and center.
And the first step to creating such content is target audience definitions and examples. They improve your marketing efficiency,raise the chances of your marketing team running a successful marketing strategy, and allow you to make the most of your marketing dollars.
The above methods should clarify how you are supposed to find your online audience. But it is one thing to find them and a whole different thing to create a content strategy that targets them and a personalized digital marketing strategy.
You can find them yourself, but you should leave it in the hands of an expert writer, such as Zoey Writers, to create the content that targets them for you. It involves a tremendous amount of work, which you would be better off letting someone else handle as you grow your business.
Contact us today to learn how our content writing services can be the final piece in your marketing jigsaw.
Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash. Thanks, Melanie :)
