If you are not targeting the right people, then you won’t acquire new business. If you don’t acquire new business, then you may not make it a full year.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a group of people who are most likely to purchase your product or service.

Some of the traits used to describe a target audience include:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Education background
• Consumption habits
• Purchasing power

For example, if you own a small running shoe business, your target audience will be runners.

Marketing your product without a target audience in mind is aimless and will result in a ton of money wasted on fruitless marketing efforts. Identifying a target audience helps you see what you’re aiming for, thus boosting the chances of hitting your target every time.

What’s the Difference Between Target Audience and Audience Personas?

While identifying your target audience allows you to understand your ideal customers to deliver targeted campaigns, its scope is still a bit broad. The more specific you define your ideal customers, the more effective you can market to them.

An audience persona is a fictional character representing an individual customer interested in your product or service. Building buyer personas entails zeroing in on your target audience and using data-backed research to pinpoint the archetypes of your ideal customers.

Some of the data you can use to define personas include:

• Personal information: name, gender, age, and location
• Business background information: job title, who they report to, how they influence decision making within their company
• Challenges: pain points and frustrations impeding business goals, their biggest concerns, and what keeps them up at night
• Objectives: short and long-term goals, how their performance is measured, the problem they need solved

The Importance of Defining Your Target Audience

1. Advertise More Effectively

You don’t want to market your brand to everyone because your message will be generic and you will not stand out. Knowing your target audience means you can understand peoples pain points and needs. From here, you can focus your messaging to resonate with their specific needs.

2. Maximize Time and Resources

Identifying your target audience allows you to avoid inefficiency. In other words, you won’t waste your marketing budget reaching customers unlikely to purchase your product or service.

More than that, it leads to better use of time. That is, you spend more time nurturing high-quality leads and less time pursuing low-value prospects.

3. Stronger Referral Base

Focusing on a specific target group, speaking about the challenges they face, and offering solutions to those challenges can benefit your brand. It establishes you as an authority in your niche and could win you a loyal customer base.

The more customers you’re able to please by way of meeting demands and building trust, the more likely those customers will be to refer you to their peers. And we all know that the best customers are those that are referred by your existing, loyal customers.

How to Define Your Target Audience

Here’s a three-step process you can follow to identify your target audience:

1. Analyze Your Product or Service

Look at your product features to determine the specific needs it fulfills. Determine who has those needs.

• What benefits does your product or service offer?
• Does it create efficiencies?
• Does it improve the workflow for certain individuals?
• Does it eliminate a burden for a certain group of people?
• Are you offering a specific skill that not a lot of people have? If so, what kind of people would benefit from that skill?

The answer to these questions will help you uncover who your ideal customers are.

2. Perform Competitor Analysis

Scope out brands that are already dominating the market and find out who their target audiences are.

You could target the same group or zero in on a niche the competitors overlook, especially if your product or service has a feature that benefits that particular niche.

3. Study Your Existing Customers

This won’t work for brand-new startups. However, if you’ve built a commendable customer base, you could dig into existing customers to identify your target audience. Gather and analyze historical data on your existing customers. Ask yourself:

• What are their job titles?
• Who do they report to?
• What problems made them turn to your product?
• How do they find answers to their problems?
• What social media sites do they frequent?

Find commonalities that can help you depict your target audience. Dig deeper to establish psychographic traits like attitude, values, personalities, opinions, and values. Are there shared interests or characteristics? If yes, use them to create a profile of your ideal customers.

Online Tactics to Engage Your Target Audience

Once you identify your target customers, you need to market to them and draw them around your brand. To meet them where they are, you should use the following:

1. Social Media Ads

Globally, more than 3.6 billion people use social media. Your target audience hangs out on one of these platforms — and you already know the channel they frequent.

2. Placing Guest Content on Sites They Read

In addition, during your target audience research, you identified how your ideal customers consume content. You also probably know (or have predicted) their favorite websites and podcasts. All you have to do to reach them is to write guest content to place on these websites or offer to be a speaker in the podcasts they follow.

3. Partner with Brands That Have Similar Audiences

Lastly, explore possible partnerships with brands that have a similar audience. These aren’t competitors, rather companies that provide services to the same people you provide services to.

Identifying your target audience is a crucial step in writing your marketing plan and mapping out your overall business strategy. It’s a step that cannot be overlooked, so make sure you dedicate enough time to figuring it out, and as long as you use this guide, you’ll be doing so successfully.

For assistance with finding your target audience or any of your marketing queries, visit our services or training programs page to see how we can help. Alternatively, you can book in for a Free 30 Minute Discovery Call today!