Target audiences are the pillars on which marketing efforts of any company are built. So, finding the right target audience is a priority for any business.
Before talking about how to find your target audience, let us have an idea about what a target audience is and the other important things that you need to know to get assisted in your hunt.
What Are Target Audiences?
Target audiences are a group of consumers that are likely to be the most interested ones in your products or offers. They have common traits and interests. These consumers are targeted for marketing and are characterized by their specific demographics and behaviour.
For instance, a shoe-making company can manufacture “Sports shoes” targeting young males and females between the age of 16 and 25.
Canva is a popular online designing tool with two target audiences.
The first ones are the designers who take images and videos from here, and the other target audiences are the social marketers.
The latter look out for captivating visuals for promotions and digital campaigning.
To put it in the simplest words, target audiences are the group of people to whom you address your product, services and campaigns. They are described by demographic and behavioural attributes like education, income, age, localization and gender.
Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience
A successful marketing effort begins with defining the target audience.
It enables you to focus on your marketing efforts much more effectively. Knowing your target audience can strengthen your brand voice, accelerating your social media branding efforts. When you know the demographics and behaviour of your target audience, you will be able to connect with them much more easily.
Just think of using any advertisement and then think of crafting that advertisement as per your target audience’s needs.
Personalized ads that are tailor-made according to the needs of your targeted consumers are engaging and much more effective.
According to a McKinsey study, tailored advertisements can increase ROI 8 times and sales 10-12 times at least.
Types of Target Audience
In the present digital era, finding the right target audience is easier than what it used to be once.
Knowing the different types of target audiences accelerates your marketing progress as you know exactly for whom the campaign has to be created.
Audiences can be segmented into groups and can be broken into the following categories.
If you want to know how to find your target audience, you will have to know the different attributes to recognize them. Target audiences can be classified on the basis of age, income, gender, education, etc.
Purchase Intention:
These types of target audiences are a group of people or audiences who want to buy certain products or services and want to collect information about the same.
Data gathered to find these types of the target audience will help you know which products need to be pushed up. Purchase intention targeted audiences are crucial for e-commerce stores.
Demography:
This is useful in gathering socio-economic data. It includes attributes like age, education, gender, geographic location, etc.
With the help of this demographic data, you can keep your campaigns targeted. For instance, outfits or footwear can target a certain age group, like 18-24, 30-45, or males or females from a particular town or city.
Interests:
This is the data about users’ hobbies, passions and other things they either look for or read about.
When you know your customers’ passion, you will be able to engage them better.
For instance, if the interest of your target audience is in books, you can offer them the same as a free gift.
Subculture:
These are groups of people who share a common taste, interest or experience.
Businesses make use of these cultures to know and understand whom they are reaching. Netflix and Amazon Prime make use of subcultures for targeting audiences.
How to Find Your Target Audience?
Your efforts should begin with understanding your audience first.
Begin with identifying what their needs, issues and desires are. You should know who they are, what attributes they have etc. if you have adequate data about the users, you need to begin by analyzing it with the help of adequate tools like Data Management Platform and Google Analytics.
You should also analyze your product or services to find out what benefits they offer and whether they cater to their customer’s needs and desires.
Make Use of Google Analytics:
A commonly used tool known as Google Analytics is used to obtain demographic details about your target audience, their interests and needs.
With this tool, you can locate all the website insights. The tool has different sections, and the users can find other things about the visitors, like their ages, locations, and genders.
All these sections are labelled clearly on the tool’s dashboard, and the colourful graphs make it easier to read and interpret.
With the help of Google Analytics, you will know things like where the visitors are coming from, their ages and gender, etc. You will also understand how they are coming to your site (from social media accounts, backlinks or other sources).
Social Media Analytics Help:
Every social media channel is different with the help of their analytics, you can find out which is the most engaging one.
You need to know if it is a funny meme on Instagram, Tweet on a hot topic, or a FB post, which of the social media platforms and which post keeps your target audience engaged. Different types of social media platforms have different audiences. For instance, Twitter has only a short form of content, as Twitter handles allow only limited characters, whereas Facebook has a longer form of posts.
Instagram is used by teens mostly, and it is a visual social media channel that demands stunning graphics.
With the help of social media analytics, you can know what’s working and worthwhile. Also, you will be able to form the right strategy that works.
Engaging With Social Media Audiences:
Interacting with your social media followers is very important because they are your target audience.
You can create buyers’ persona and present them with precisely what they need.
Not only this, you can use social media accounts to invite CTA or Call to Action. Connecting with your target audience after impressing them can help you engage with them in a far better and more effective way.
Create Persona of Readers and Then Target Blog Content:
With the help of Google Analytics, you will know what type of target audiences are visiting you.
When you do so, you can provide the readers with precisely what they need. When you can make a reader’s persona and solve the challenges and issues they come across with your content; you can build a level of trust with them and target them.
By checking the performance of your website, you can know which type of content is the best and the worst performing one and what blog post interests them.
You can consider sharing the most engaging blog posts on Social Media Platforms and can expand your reach.
Bottom Line
In a nutshell, you need to experiment by building basic and standard segments and then using them in your campaigning to check out how these segments perform.
You need to build audiences based on how much they can spend and offer them the products and services that they can afford.
Every business owner wants to know how to find a target audience. The journey does not stop at what your target audiences are looking for.
You need to analyze what they do, offer them a personalized brand experience and then measure the results.
Building the right type of target audience is a challenging task.
If you want long-term gains from targeting the audiences, you must monitor how their requirements, interests, and expectations change over time.
