How to Find Your Target Audience? – Tips to Get Started

Digital marketing has revolutionized the marketing industry and is immensely important when reaching potential customers. However, digital marketing strategies are based on the same principles as traditional marketing. Therefore, the first and foremost factor to consider when creating a marketing plan is learning how to find your target audience for your product. 

What Is a Target Audience?

A target audience refers to a group of people with specific characteristics, such as age range, behavior, or occupation. Understanding your target audience is critical when it comes to marketing strategies. It helps you to determine where to invest in advertising, how to appeal to customers, and what products to develop next.

Your target audience may be more general or specialized, depending on what you sell. For instance, if you sell computer hardware tools, your target audience would be a diverse group of people since almost everyone uses computers. However, if you specialize in selling software tools, your target audience, such as web developers, would be more specialized.

Questions on How to Find Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience and their interests are vital factors to be more appealing to them. So let’s review some questions you’ll need an answer to when identifying your target audience.

Where do they hang online?

Knowing where your target audience spends their time online can help you to focus your marketing efforts on those platforms. For instance, if your target audience is young adults, social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat may be an excellent place to promote your products.

What is their preferred way of communication?

Different age groups and demographics have different preferred methods of communication. For example, younger generations prefer instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp, while older generations may prefer phone calls or emails.

What is their demographic information?

Demographic information, such as age range, expertise, location, job title, etc., can help narrow your target audience.

What is their psychographic information?

Psychographic information, such as behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, etc., can help you to understand your target audience’s motivations and behaviors.

What problems does your offering or service address?

Understanding the problems your product or service addresses can help you identify your target audience. For example, if you sell skincare products, your target audience would be people with skincare concerns.

The Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience

Knowing who your target audience is can assist you in developing efficient marketing approaches that will match your audience’s interests and preferences. Let’s discuss some of the benefits of knowing your target audience.

Improved ROI

Targeted marketing efforts result in a higher return on investment (ROI) than broad marketing efforts. For example, if you advertise during the Super Bowl, which is expensive, only 25% of the viewers would be genuine buyers of your product or service. However, if you run an advertisement on the right channel or with a special publication, the right people will see the ad, resulting in a higher ROI.

Effective Communication

Understanding how to find your target audience can help you engage with customers more efficiently. By creating content and developing brands that align with the preferences and values of potential buyers, you can effectively communicate with your audience and resonate with specific personas. This approach is essential in today’s world, where users expect personalized and targeted advertisements that meet their needs.

Types of Target Audiences

When you examine different target audiences, you are exploring different ways to specify who you’re creating your digital marketing strategy for. Your target audience can be divided into groups or further into sub-categories. Let’s get into more details.

Intentions of Purchase

Intentions of purchase refer to a consumer’s plans or goals when considering buying a product or service. It encompasses the consumer’s desire, motivation, and expectation of the product and their intention to take action to acquire it. The intentions of purchase can be influenced by various factors, such as the consumer’s needs, wants, preferences, attitudes, and past experiences with the product or brand. It is an essential concept in marketing as it helps businesses understand their target audience’s purchase behavior and develop strategies to influence and encourage them to make a purchase.

Interests 

This kind of data reveals what people’s interests and hobbies are. Understanding this data allows you to understand their motivation and behaviors. For example, consider the scenario where you discover your potential audience is intrigued by travel. If so, you can determine how to include this message in your digital marketing strategy to attract more potential customers. 

Subculture

These are social groups of people who share similar experiences. A particular music scene genre or entertainment genre would serve as an illustration of this. Subcultures help people define and understand who they are, and a business company can take advantage of those cultures to determine who they should target. 

For example, consider how the audience will relate to your business by addressing this particular subculture, particularly if you have a sizable prospective audience. For instance, Netflix uses social media accounts customized for different kinds of subcultures to sell to the people who watch particular genres and types of shows. As you can imagine, developing a target audience requires research.

Ways to Determine Your Target Audience

Determining your target audience is essential for effective marketing and business strategy. There are several ways to identify your target audience. Let’s take a closer look at 3 of them.

Analyze the Customer Base

OExamining your existing customers is one of the best ways to discover your target audience This approach shows you how to find your target audience that is already interested in your products or services. First, ask yourself their age, place of residence, and field of interest. The most effective way to do this is by engaging in social media activity or sending customer surveys. 

Develop Personas 

Another advantageous technique to focus on the various groups of people that make up your audience is to create personas. This is especially useful if your product or service appeals to many customers. You can use personas to identify your target audience’s bread demographics, characteristics, and requirements. These personas are developed by using data from surveys, digital interactions, and other sources the marketers can use to get a hold of the target market. This includes favorite pastimes, television shows, magazines, etc. Creating three to five personas to utilize this technique successfully is highly recommended.  

Check on Your Competitors

Your competitors are there for a reason. The competition allows you to learn and improve on their mistakes and drive you to improve your digital marketing strategy. Even though you cannot access their internal data or marketing strategies, you may still gain loads of knowledge by observing what they do effectively and conducting some simple market research and social listening. You can take as an example their social media profiles, the audience that responds to their content, which accounts they engage with, and implement this knowledge about their market tactics to gain efficiency on yours to pursue the same customers.