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How to Define Your Target Audience

How to Define Your Target Audience

Online businesses are on a roll these days as most people prefer sitting on their sofa and ordering what they want from right there. They offer high convenience to people as would have got through offline marketing. You can return a product if not liked or any issues are there, try & buy, purchase on easy EMIs, and much more. 

All these factors have played a big role in the success of online marketing which is growing day by day. But for all this, it is important for a business to first decide who will buy their products or services and why. This is because, if you are not clear about the audience you are never going to get genuine leads and run a marketing campaign

This post will help you know how you can define your target audience for better marketing efforts and better long-term results. After reading this post, you will be able to easily identify and define the right audience for your business. 

Before we move further, let us briefly discuss the target audience and why it is important. 

What is the target audience?

A target audience is a group of people or consumers, who are ideal for the product or service you provide. It is defined based on certain parameters including demographics like age, gender, interests, income, profession, and marital status. 

In other words, we can say that the target audience is a defined segment of the target market with the highest chances of giving conversions. Target audience is a part of the target market with a segmented group of similar interests, demographics, and other factors relevant to your brand. 

What is the importance of the target audience?

Imagine you have a grocery store with a home delivery facility only in Dublin and seeing the ads placed on social media you are getting queries from people in Tallaght. The reason for this is that you’ve not defined your target audience and everyone interested in buying grocery online is clicking your ads.

This is why it is important for you to define the target audience as it will prevent unnecessary clicks on the ads while saving the cost. Considering this will ensure that people only who can reach you and who are the most relevant for the products or services are able to contact you. This is necessary for you to focus well and make efforts on something that will deliver. 

Define your target audience

  • Look out for current customers

The first thing that you need to do is understand your current customers. Conduct research to identify the problems that your product is solving for them and what are their views. Doing this will give you a better idea of what you should do next and which audience segment will be the best for you. 

Create data about the demographics, interests, and other factors about your current audience that hold importance for you. Plus, identify the channels by which they got to know about your brand and how they got connected. 

All these factors are important to create the right audience segment and get genuine leads. 

  • Perform social media analysis

There are so many tools available in the market for digital marketing that can give you very important data that can tell who is interacting with your social media accounts and what are their behavior. This data is the key to define your target audience. 

Once you get to know what visitors are doing on your website or social media accounts, you can strategize ways to engage with them and get them to your CTA. 

Social media analytics is a great way to understand the visitors on your website and social media accounts as it will give you insights into how much time they are spending, which tabs they are opening, and which products they are looking for. With all that information, you can set your target audience and communicate with them specifically. 

  • Know your competitors

Getting information about your competitors always holds the key to make strategies better than them. It is of most importance in defining your target audience as well. 

Always remember, competitors are the best teachers and they can give you some amazing ideas for your business that you haven’t even thought of. 

By keeping an eye on your competitor, you will be able to know about their target audience, marketing strategies, and the way they are interacting with the audience and the way the audience is engaging with them. 

If your competitors have similar categories of products or services that you offer, then it will give you a better idea of who else can be in your target audience except for the one you currently have. It will widen up your reach and ensure better engagement with the audience. Plus, you will also get to know about the strategies working for them and those which are not. Thus, you can create further plans accordingly. 

  • Interact with the audience

To define your target audience, you need to interact with the visitors on your website and identify what they are looking for. Knowing the problems they have and how you can help could be a deciding factor in defining the right audience segment for you. 

Interaction with the audience will tell you about their expectations, their thoughts about your brand, valuable suggestions, and much more. Interaction is the way to identify in which areas you need to work harder and which is the best audience for your business’s niche. Considering this will tell you which is the best audience segment that can give better conversions. 

  • Identify which is not your target audience

There was an example above where we talked about the grocery store providing home delivery and online services only in Dublin but still receiving queries from Tallaght. In this example, everyone outside Dublin does not qualify for being the target audience for the business because it does not serve outside that city. So, it is important to run a marketing campaign accordingly that only people in Dublin can see the ads and other efforts made by you to get better results. 

Similarly, every business must know which is not their target audience to shift their focus on a narrower segment. It is one of the key parameters when it comes to defining your audience, as this decides how your marketing strategy should be and what kind of content you should deliver. 

  • Demographic and psychographic factors are important

Nothing can define your target audience best than their demographics and lifestyle. Considering the same above example of the grocery business, if you see that the audience on your online platform is looking for only branded products than you can get an idea about their lifestyle. Plus, analyzing the type of brand they are choosing will give more information about them.

While on the other hand, if people are looking for cheap products and local brands, then you can say that your target audience belongs to the middle class. 

Getting deep insights into all this will help you know better that which people are interested in your products and accordingly you can target them by sending exclusive offers and discounts to ensure more engagement. 

  • Identify the problems your products or services can solve

Before knowing whom to sell, you need to first know complete details about your products. Identify the problems that your products or services could solve and then look for the audience facing those problems. 

This is one of the best ideas to identify your target audience. Creating a marketing campaign where you can tell the problems people are facing along with how you can solve them could be a great idea to define the target audience. Your ads will attract genuine leads and you can take appropriate measures to convert them. 

  • Test social ads

Once you find out the target segment of the audience that is best for your business, the next required thing is to see whether it reciprocates or not. For that, you need to run social ads and see how the audience behaves. 

If you experience that they are interacting the way you’ve wanted, then all your audience research has paid off, while on the other hand if the results are not as you have thought, there is much more work you are required to do. 

Conclusion

Target audience is a must for any business to compete strongly and thrive, and if your target audience is not right, everything you do is nothing but a waste. Explaining your products to someone who is not interested or someone who is not in need is not only a waste of time but also a waste of resources. 

Thus, it doesn’t matter how much effort you are making to start a business, if your target audience is not right, there is no value to the efforts made. Another thing to consider is if you think that everyone comes under your target audience, then you are not going to get the success you want plus you will end up utilizing a lot more resources than required. 

This post is focused on telling you some tips that can help define your target audience and get the success you want. We hope, it would have solved your purpose of getting here and will help you in the future.