Launching a new product, service or business is risky on its own. All you have to do, however, is understand the market dynamics to reduce the risk. One of the most crucial elements of the marketing strategy for your business is identifying your target audience. Strategies that have niched down and targeted market segments are much more successful than the broad marketing strategies.
That technically means you define your target audience before embarking on any marketing efforts. Target audience is the certain group of people who are expected to purchase your services or products. These are both the potential and existing customers. Target audience are the specific people you want to channel all your marketing efforts on whether via social media or digital marketing campaigns.
The following are substantial ways to find your target audience:
Understand the pain points and purchase path
As a marketer, you need to understand the purchase path and pain points for your customers. Here you want to ask yourself two fundamental questions:
- What goal is my target audience aiming at?
- How can I help solve their problem?
These questions will allow you create a persona and content that explains how you will address their problems. The brand story will be centered on the ultimate buying cycle which involves the awareness, consideration and decision. Typically, personas are fictional characters you develop based on your research which can be used to represent diverse user types who use your services or products.
Curating a persona assists the marketer identify the user’s pain points. Tweak your marketing strategy to what categorically affects the user and how you can help them solve the problem to land your target audience.
Conduct Market Research
Conduct thorough market research to understand what the market is all about. You can perform a SWOT analysis and understand the business weaknesses and strengths together with the threats and opportunities. With this market research you are sure to find out the customers’:
- Demographics
- Location
- Industries
- Psychographics
- Market trends
- Customer buying habits
- Economic shifts
- Motivations
- Competition
- Personality type
Having knowledge on all these factors will be the initial step in understanding what your target audience is. Checking on the marketplace forces, buying motivations and competitive challenges will tell you who is more interested in the services and products you offer.
Check the Existing Customers
One sure way to find your target audience is looking at the existing customers. That includes looking at their preferences and demographics. You could explore them:
- Using helpful tools such as HubSpot, Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to acquire extensive information about the customers.
- Examining the website analytics and social media. By this you are sure to see who visits your website, the pages visited most as you interact with them on social media.
Avoid a Broad Reach
Avoid casting your net to a broad group of audience. But rather target the people who are more likely to purchase your products. They may be few at the beginning but they will grow with time and you will enjoy brand loyalty. In the end you are going to have people who will be entirely interested in most of your products or services.
These people are also going to become your brand evangelists and do some advertising for you. Only spreading your net to a specific group of people will show you who the right target audience are. You will then channel your marketing efforts on them and leverage their problems using the solution you provide.
Multi-segment Marketing
It is an effective strategy in finding your target audience. The strategy involves targeting customers from diverse market segments who would purchase the same products. They could be the decision makers in the sales funnel who would contribute to the overall purchase.
Use Facebook Insights
Businesses that have a Facebook page have an added advantage. Facebook will give you a wide variety of insights on the page at no cost. These insights are almost similar to Google Analytics in that you will receive all the essential information you need to understand your target audience. The insights on the dashboard will tell you who visited your page and where they are located.
Facebook will also give you more crucial information such as the integrations with other sites like Twitter and interests of the visitors. You will also know whether the visitors purchase products online. Such insights will show you the target audience for your business.
 Finding your target audience should never be a hard to crack nut. If you meticulously follow the right steps and hacks you should land the target customers pretty easily. Make sure you make good use of the Facebook insights. It will give you much more information than just numbers about your viewers. From the information you will determine who requires your services more.
The existing customers will also tell you who is your target audience. Just look at their needs and identify potential customers with similar needs. Market research is also one very effective strategy. Find the consumers in the market who have the problems to which you can provide the solution – these are your target audience.
