This post will discuss How to Find (and Research) Your Target Audience. Finding the ideal target audience for your company isn’t a sign of closing the doors to those who don’t fit within your definition of a perfect customer.
Instead, researching your target audience can help you target your marketing efforts and brand message to specific demographics that are more likely to buy your products than the other segments.
What Is a Target Audience?
Your target audience is the category of customers who are most likely to desire the product you offer and, consequently, the type of people who ought to look at your advertisements.
The target audience can be determined by gender, age, income, geographic location, interests, and other variables.
Depending on what you are selling the product, your audience could be more niche or more comprehensive in your message that resonates with them. It’s also possible to determine the channels they are most comfortable with.
Examples of a Target Audience
The target audience is the same group of people. This could include females, males, teens or children. They typically share a desire to read, run, or playing soccer. Personas can aid advertisers in researching relevant magazines or professional publications.
Types of Target Audience
We’ve briefly discussed the characteristics that comprise the demographic. Many aspects of them in the marketing world can help you identify the right market.
You can divide your audience into groups or categorize them further with categories like:
1 : Purchase intent
People are looking to purchase an item and wish to find out more details before making a purchase. Examples include people who are buying an updated laptop, vehicle, clothing, television, or. This information is essential to determine how to improve your communication with your target audience.
2 : Interests
This is information about what people enjoy, such as hobbies and interests. Knowing this information helps you reach out to your target audience meaningfully and uncover buyer motivations and behaviour. F
or instance, those who love road cycling are likely to be the most enthusiastic about purchasing new road bikes during the spring, as the weather becomes more pleasant and the racing season for road bikes begins.
If, for instance, you notice that a huge majority of potential buyers are interested in travelling, it is possible to find how to incorporate that information into your marketing strategy to draw attention to many prospective customers.
Subcultures are groups of people who are identified with a shared experience. A good example could be a particular music scene or type of entertainment.
People identify themselves through subcultures, and businesses can use them to determine the people they’re reaching out to. An excellent way to reach subcultures is to think about how they connect to your company, particularly in the case of a vast possible audience.
For example, Netflix markets to their subcultures viewers watching specific kinds of content through social media accounts targeted to the respective subcultures.
You’ve probably guessed that choosing an audience for your campaign requires some investigation, which leads to figuring out the people you wish to connect with and the best way to achieve it in a manner distinct from other businesses.
Target Market vs Target Audience:
While both target audiences and target markets revolve around dividing consumers into different groups to make better decisions, the targeted market is a particular category of people at which a business’s offerings are targeted.
A target audience is defined by that group based on the audience’s demographics, such as interests, preferences, and buying historical data. You could define your ideal segment by identifying your perfect market.
If the target market is “marketers aged 25-35,” your target audience would be similar to “marketers living in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 25-35.”
This is a brief overview of the target audience. Let’s get into the specifics, including the various audiences and how to discover your ideal audience.
How to Find (and Research) Your Target Audience
1: Deconstruct Your Market
Look at the demographics that underlie your product to find out who will benefit from it and the people who are likely to purchase it. Think about the following elements:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Education
- Income
- Occupation
- Marital Status
- Ethnicity
The data provides a simple picture of your buyer’s everyday activities, routines and purchasing decisions, allowing you to become familiar with your most important clients. This is also done to make your message more relevant to those who can make the biggest impression.
2: Use Psychographics to Talk to Your Audience
Demographic data can reveal the people purchasing your products or services, and psychographics explains what they are looking for when they buy them. Monitoring your target market’s interests and preferences will help you gain insight into their habits and preferences.
It can also assist you in incorporating the characteristics of these groups in your branding messages. Psychographics can be described as:
- Personality
- Attitudes
- Values
- Interests/hobbies
- Lifestyles
- Behaviour
Psychographic profiling will require you to be immersed in your market’s psychology and buying motivations. Your research should uncover patterns and trends within your customer’s personalities, preferences, interests, and beliefs.
This will help you better understand the content marketing strategies and further motivate your clients to act and move through the sales process.
3: Study your existing audience
Your current customers are the ideal target to research how your perfect market will look. It is possible to distribute surveys on customer satisfaction to your existing customers to learn about their experiences.
You can distribute this via mail, or when your target audience is more adept with social media and has social media accounts, you can post surveys via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms to gain insight.
This is an effective method of understanding your audience’s thoughts and how they think about your brand. Investing in a research tool for your audience to find out more about where your ideal clients are and their content consumption habits are possible.
SparkToro, for instance, will help analyze millions of social and online profiles to uncover demographics, behaviour patterns and discussion topics.
4: Collect data from your sales teams
If you’re seeking more information, your sales team (who interacts with customers daily) is a great source to develop your customer database.
You can start immediately by asking your sales reps to conduct your customers through a short questionnaire to receive immediate responses to any market study. In addition, the sales reps must also be aware of the most frequently asked issues, concerns and types of customers.
5: Know the needs of your users and buyers
The person who uses your products or services could significantly differ from those who make the decisions. This is why you’ll need to create content specifically to target these audiences.
For example, if your company is a B2B company selling CRM applications, you’ll most likely target mid-sized businesses with greater or lesser than a hundred employees.
The software’s users include:
- Between 25 and 35 years old
- In a company’s customer support department digital marketing firm
- Are you looking for user-friendly platforms?
- Searching for relevant and helpful options like easy access across devices, and rapid sharing across departments
- The purchasers of this software include:
- Between 40 and 55 years old in higher management
- Are you looking for a program that’s worth the cost?
- You are looking for a device that can improve your business’s efficiency and processes
- Are you looking for a tool that is simple to use and comes with many useful functions?
5: Check your competitors
What are your competitors’ targets? Research on competitors is a fantastic method to learn about the weaknesses of your competitors and unexplored areas in the market.
You can also study and learn from their strategies to promote their brand to prospective customers. This could inspire you to find ways to stand out and fill any gaps in the market for content.
6: Trackable short hyperlinks to gather information on any platform
Naturally, you’ll need to know as much about your customers as possible, but it isn’t easy to accomplish this across many channels.
Customized short URLs (or branding hyperlinks) are a great way to gain invaluable insights into your customers’ habits and content preferences, even down to the days of the week or the time they’re most likely to connect with your company’s brand.
Tools such as the URL shortener from Rebrandly can be useful because they allow users to make short, customized URLs to use on social media and in newsletters, emails and everywhere else to aid in collecting data you can utilize to help you determine your strategy for targeting.
7: Targeting the Right People
When it comes to B2C and B2B marketing, understanding who you’re speaking to and knowing what they perceive is essential to reaching the outcomes you’re hoping for.
With a clear population segment, you can develop and implement content marketing strategies that align with their preferences, generate high-quality traffic, and increase your authority source.
Conclusion
If you realize the importance of delineating your target market, the benefits of systematic research focused on a specific population segment are apparent. The results are contingent upon the quality of the information you collect, which depends on the tools you employ to gather analysis of your audience.
FAQ about How to Find (and Research) Your Target Audience
Why is it important to be aware of the intended people who will benefit from your research?
By defining the audience you want to target by identifying target audiences, it is much easier to draw attention to a person’s work because their requirements and goals are in the front of their minds. For startups, this procedure will require time, research and tweaking, but it gives an invaluable insight into the requirements and motives of customers who could be a good fit.
Why is it important to know the target audience of your research?
The most effective way to keep satisfying these needs is to simply ask your clients what they’d like to hear and compare that to the other available information. Concentrating on the people you want to reach is just good business sense and is well worth the money.
What is the objective of the audience you are targeting?
Key Takeaways. Target audiences are individual group of people who are identified as potential customers for an organization. The people in a target audience have a typical demographic like age, geographical location and socioeconomic status. Defining a target audience segment can help create more effective marketing campaigns.