What is the target audience and how to find it?

Every company is looking for the right customer. The one that would appreciate a brand and have no trouble understanding core values, mostly because they would coincide.

Target audience is the specific segment of internet users – customers and followers – you want to hear your brand message. You work to provide these people with solutions to their problems or offer them something valuable. These people might or might not appear quickly, but if your brand is very good at what you do, both you and your audience need each other. Target audiences have a significant influence on marketing decisions. For example, you will place an advertisement on specific platforms because your audience might notice them there.

There are a variety of methods that could lead a brand to its target audience. If you think there is a recipe for that, you are very wrong. The state of the modern market is somewhat chaotic; one never knows precisely where new followers can come from. Customers could find out about a specific brand in a twisted way without even looking for something specific. So, you can’t have one plan about reaching customers but have to know how to find your audience in order to build an active community and brand culture around your business. Every strategy might possess a little gap in it. However, if you don’t know clearly what kind of audience you want to reach, this gap could be more prominent.

Before you start looking for the target audience, obviously, you have to define what unify different people that could follow your brand or use your products. It is one of the essential stages of your journey as a brand. All your marketing strategies will find its way through the information you gather about those for whom you have started your brand. Your target audience consists of people who are most likely to share an interest or even need in your products. They will follow and support your brand.

If you have a vivid understanding of the main characteristics of your target audience, the easier it is to find them. Vagueness should be as little as possible. Broad categories like age or demographics could be constructive at first, but not deep enough.

A rational way to start is to learn from what you already have. Gather data on your current audience, no matter how big or small it is. Your existing customers and the fact of who they are can tell you a lot about your own brand. Why these people follow you on social media? How did they find you? Did you expect them to be your audience? Answering these questions is very helpful when you are at the beginning of defining your target audience.

When it comes to defining the age of your audience, you don’t have to look for specific numbers. The only thing you need is a general picture: how many age groups surround you, what age decade in most people that are following you. It will make bring many things: what generation found you interesting, and what exactly resonates with their interests. It’s absolutely vital to know how old are people who support your brand. You will get to know how to move forward efficiently when you aware that your audience has specific values inherent to young people of 25-34 years old.

Buyer’s persona

Imagine that you have an ideal customer. Who would it be? What age? What geographical location this customer should represent? There are some basic questions to realize who is your hypothetical ideal customer. It includes age, gender, location, employment/profession, income. The portrait of a buyer’s persona can only be this generalized. To understand your target audience, you have to know general facts on the subject.

How to create it? As you might already have guessed, many apps will help you to build a buyer’s persona quickly. Also, you can ask your audience to answer a few questions and eventually get something they share. Most likely, it would be some of these essential things.

Information about the buyer’s persona helps get the picture of the customer and how they decide to buy a product or to ignore it. Having such a portrait also helps to reach more people that would actually enjoy being your customer.

Types of the target audience

When we say the target audience, we mean an artificial subject because the target audience is not something out there; it depends on your definition. According to your goals, you can describe and define audiences differently.

The audience with an intention to but a product — it is people who have a need in the product and want to make a purchase based on an informed decision. To know who would be interested in your product and offer it to them, you’ve got to see this type of target audience.

The target audience is based on interest. This is not about necessaries, but what people are love to do, what they enjoy in their free time. This information helps to understand motivation and maybe even build a better emotional connection with the audience. Perhaps, these people won’t buy a lot, but they could be your loyal followers and support.

Lifestyle – particular preferences in spending time choosing cloth or entertainment. It is not as narrow as the previous one and includes many aspects. Lots of brands, besides promoting some products or services, also popularize a particular lifestyle and even a worldview. For example, if you promote shoes, you’re also should be promoting a particular culture around them; people rarely would look for brands in order to buy only a product. They are also looking for something that would emphasize their lifestyle.

Target market, which is not the same as the target audience, but cannot be defined without it. When we talk about the target audience, it includes a quite ample portrait. The target market, however, is only about a particular group of consumers. To describe it, you don’t need anything specific except their interest in your product.

A traditional way to define a target audience is to base on demographics and location. Don’t be confused with the word “traditional” here, because it’s also essential. To know the age of your prospective customers and their location is key for the business.

If you have a large audience, it is helpful to know what different age groups share. It could be anything: popular TV shows, music or views. To refer to some of these things would make your community stronger.

The types of audiences can be more or less narrow. The matter here is what you find important when you define the kind of audience you want to reach.

Multiple target audience

Big brands managed to gather around them different audiences. Besides their products, these companies represent more: certain lifestyle, worldview, or even support of some orders of the day. If you manage to address different audiences with your product and build many of them on various social media pages, you are likely to have multiple audiences.

It is much easier to handle if you have different brand pages on various social media. Some themes are better to highlight on certain pages. It is natural that some content will be better to post on Instagram and others on Facebook. Thankfully to social media, you can build multiple audiences around your brand and show different facets of your work.

How to define your target audience?

The big mistake that some brands can do is trying to gather different audiences. Basically, not even audiences but everyone. Without a proper focus on a specific group of people that might give them what they need, these brands just looking for as many people as possible.

Defining a target audience is the first stage, even pre-stage of the entire process. When the brand’s owner knows what exactly the brand needs from the audience, it won’t be hard to define it. It doesn’t make any sense, nor in business or somewhere else, to try to be interesting to everyone. There are basic moves you need to go through defining your audience.

First and foremost, you should know all about the audience you want. It includes only several things: what is their problem, how they face it, and how they are trying to deal with it. It goes without saying that you are going to offer how to solve it.

If you know your audience, you can make your move and offer a solution. It could be anything relevant to the problem these people face. Before the brand becomes bigger, you have to find your first prospective customers.

Once you know that potentially buying the audience is out there, ready to interact with you and use your products, you have to focus on improving traffic conversion. Learn what already working and apply this strategy broadly. If you capture some strategy that rather fails you, don’t leave it immediately: try to understand what went wrong and why.

How to find your target audience?

Earlier, we talked about creating a buyer’s persona. It is the first step in the process of finding the audience for your brand. If you know and understand what sort of challenges your customers might have, you practically will be in their shoes.

Explore every single fact you get from analytics and statistics. Many excellent tools will help you gather essential data. Start with social media. Which one works best for your audience? Maybe you have two slightly different audiences on Instagram and Facebook. Looking at your audiences on each page might bring you great insights. When you are aware of those who already found you, you can plan how to move in the future. Besides, with the profound analysis, you can learn what worked and what is better to abandon your methods and strategies.

Social media analysis is good, but to complete it, take a look at Google analytics. Google rarely offer weak marketing tools. This one is handy to gather essential information – age, a level of engagement, location, etcetera. Google also cares about the visual representation of data: to grasp the gist is easy.

Reflect on how well you perform. In many ways, it is not about how good you are, but what people are interested in. Or what your audience finds interesting on some of your pages. That will help you to build another strategy to engage people. Exploring what worked in your self-presentation and content-making is a way to discover a brand with the eye of the customer.

Interact with your audiences everywhere. It is an advice that rises out of an opinion that brands are better when they communicate with the clients instead of only selling.

There are so many ways of communicating with customers directly today: Instagram and Facebook stories, reply to commentaries, make live sessions on YouTube and surveys. This is what creates trust and makes people loyal to a brand. If you genuinely care about your customers, there will be more of those who can support your brand.

Knowing the motivations of your target audience is important if you want to build a strong relationship with them. It all about understanding the expectations of others from the brand. If people know that you are aware of their needs and can give them the right thing, they will support you. In marketing there is a mirroring rule: you get what you give. This is precisely how it works with customers.

Summary

To make an informed decision in business is to avoid possible failure. Your overall marketing strategy is based on nothing else but customers expectations and needs. If you don’t know them, why are you working? We went through each stage of finding and building the target audience around the brand.

Knowing your target audience important for many reasons. Simply to orient yourself in your progress, you should see how the audience reacts to your brand activity and who the audience is. The connection between brand activity and the audience is what creates opportunities to move forward and expand the influence.