How to find your target audience in 7 ways

Businesses often rely on an established customer outreach process that helps them find relevant audience to bring value to their practice. From personalized content to intricately tailored strategy that appeal a target market, people do everything to keep their ship afloat.

However, the process of finding the target audience can be tricky with several factors affecting the success of your endeavor. Don’t worry through. This article has all you need. Read on to learn about:

• Why defining your target audience is important
• What is target audience
• Seven ways to find target audience

Why defining your target audience is important?

While searching for potential customers, new and old businesses often aim to work with various audiences. Although it is seemingly a positive thing as more connections may result in more opportunities, you must ask yourself what those people bring to the table.

Do your efforts align with the mindset of valuable customers? Or are you just temporarily gathering people with little to no use for your products/services?

When you keep your domain too wide, it isn't easy to make deeper connections with the audience that can last for decades. Bringing personalization into the picture is only possible if you identify who can benefit from your services and products the most. This particular set of people will be your target audience.

What is the target audience?

It's a collection of individuals from a certain demographic, location, or gender e.g. men above the age of 30 living in California or independent female lawyers with an income of $50,000 or above. The more specific your target community will be, the more personalized you can make your marketing outreach.

There are different types of audiences, and you approach each one differently:

• The Lay audience refers to the regular, uninformed people will little to no knowledge about the technical aspects of your services. While addressing them, you'll need appealing dialogues, convincing benefits, and top-notch marketing strategies.
• The Managerial audience is the one that holds technical information but doesn’t necessarily have an idea about your services. They might need a debriefing before they can make a decision.
• The Expert audience has the field practitioners, skilled and informed on even the intricate details on the subject matter. You'll need to prepare extensive documents and reliable sources while delivering an error-free proposal to get them on board.

Seven ways to find your target audience

Here are the seven ways you can effectively find your target audience and connect with the right people:

1: Get to know your current audience:

The first thing you need to do is test out the waters you're currently in by analyzing the current audience. Of course, someone who's already buying from you will have a clear reason behind the purchase. Identifying the many factors that lead them to become a part of your company can help you refine your current way of doing things.

But it doesn't stop there. Categorizing people into different groups based on age, demographic, race, personality, interests, etc., can help you better understand their daily lives and what kind of problem they may face regularly. Once you've harvested this information, you can then tailor your approach to best fit the interests of high-value clients.

2: Analyze your product/services benefits:

Ask yourself questions like what is the purpose of your products/services? Who can benefit from them? And any other critical queries that effectively describe you as a company. Once you have the information, clearly list them out of your media outlet so anyone reading them has a clear overview. Then you can identify which people have the most incentive to benefit from such services.

Suppose you're a professional copywriter looking to find their target audience. You can start by listing the many benefits a reliable copywriting service can bring to a client's enterprise. Clearly describe how your concise and to-the-point writing can improve a client’s reputation while helping them convert more customers. Hence your target audience becomes anyone aiming to achieve more sales.

Of course, this is just a basic example of how you can effectively showcase your strong selling points if you have a strong understanding of your products/service. Creativity is key here.

3: Analyze user bios on social media:

A good practice, especially for new businesses, is analyzing users' bios connecting with you or your direct competitors. Many online tools can help you extract this information, but they do not accurately portray the audience. Although it is a complex and long process, you'll have to carry it out manually.

But what do you get by analyzing user bios? Let’s take an example.

Suppose you just started a new business and need help identifying the target market. You can explore the competitors' top-performing posts and look at the interactions. Each person will have a detailed bio explaining who they are or what they do. This way, a pattern may show up, describing the nature of the audience collectively.

4: Exploring the Purchase Behavior of the Target Audience

People buy things for a reason where personal preference, current conditions, and buying motives define their past purchasing behavior. In some cases, you may even have to consider the psychographic factors that revolve around cultural values and general temperament.

For example, if people of a certain demographic have a more constricted mindset than others, you need to tread extra carefully.

5: Test Social Ads:

Social media advertisements are a great way of connecting with a massive audience that spends most of their time browsing through tailored content. Luckily, each social media also offers an accompanying analytics service that provides essential insights into what users do daily. You can use any third-party software too as you deem fit. Regardless, these analytics can lay the groundwork for your ads to target the right people effectively.

While creating ads, remember to keep your end goal in mind and give the visitor a clear call to action. You can also tailor your visual and graphic strategy depending on users' interests. For example, if you have a kids' toys business, altering your ad to make it appealing to parents can be an excellent idea.

6: Determine how your customer will learn about you:

People's purchasing channels to buy stuff can be a key factor in converting them into your customers. You might’ve been asked to fill out a survey form that required you to input the medium through which you found out about a particular service. That's a common practice for businesses continuously monitoring the various channels through which customers learn about them.

For example, if your target group mostly operates on Instagram and makes their purchases there. So it'll make sense for you to refine the process of Instagram purchase. Similarly, an older person is more likely to stumble upon your services in a newspaper than on Twitter.

7: Evaluate your decision:

Once you have all the information about your target audience, it is time to run it through an extensive evaluation and ask critical questions. Consider it like strengthening glue that conjoins the many crevices in your business model.

For example, you may have missed a critical component such as the audience's average salary or preferred communication medium in your initial outreach proposal. Or you may find that the number of people that can benefit from the service is very low.

Let’s Take a Looks At Some Examples:

IKEA:

We all know the Swedish mega-company IKEA deals in dependable furniture products laced with creativity and unique designs. The main selling point of IKEA is the relatively low price with an incentive to put together the furniture yourself. Hence the target audience is individuals aged 20 to 34 belonging to the average middle-class.

As middle-class people are more likely to look for a good value 'bang for buck' proposition and are also willing to pay more for durable furniture, IKEA aligns with their goals perfectly. They don’t have a clear differentiation for gender because both men and women are equally interested. Hence giving us a great example of not including irrelevant factors no matter how significant they are in other practices.

Tesla:

Tesla is another successful company that has burst into popularity in the past decade, becoming one of the fastest-growing businesses globally. Tesla started by targeting an audience looking to make an environmental change and needed a platform. Of course, these people should also afford a middle-range luxury car, hence belonging to upper-class backgrounds.

It is safe to divide Tesla's target audience into three parts; eco-friendly enthusiasts, tech-savvy individuals, and entry-level luxury buyers. Such individuals typically fall between the age group of 20 to 40 years old. Now that Tesla has established itself, it's also opting to alter its approach towards targeting people looking to purchase their first car.

Conclusion:

The current trends of personalized content and marketing have made it necessary for every business to learn all about the target audience. Anyone continuing the outdated business practices is often left behind in a very competitive market. Luckily, we've explained everything in detail in this article that can help you identify the target audience easily.

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