How to Identify a Target Audience?

There exists a famous Chinese proverb that says that you have to know your enemy to win the battle. Well, these words definitely have the grain of truth, even if we look at them from the digital marketing angle: you have to know your target audience to generate great revenue.

Indeed, a clearly defined target audience might carry a number of reasonable advantages to your business and allow you to sell more. While a concrete portrait of your potential customer will assist you when creating a suitable advertisement, setting up key parameters of your Facebook or Instagram campaign, or putting an appropriate price on products you sell or services you offer.

But what you should do to identify your target audience? Let’s check out the information below and get one step closer to improving your business right away!

Please note: If you are struggling to correctly define your target audience, feel free to ask IntlTech’s professionals to help you out. While having years of experience in digital marketing behind their shoulders, they will gladly provide you with precise characteristics of your potential customers so that you will create ads that sell.

What Is a Target Audience?

Even if you invest immense resources into your advertising, it might still prevent you from reaching the desired result unless you know exactly what type of customers are you aiming at. Therefore, it is crucial to determine the right target audience parameters before starting any marketing efforts.

But what is a target audience? To put it simply, it is a set of characteristics that your ideal customer has to have to willingly buy your product or service. To be more precise, here are the main points you should define when creating a clear portrait of your target audience:

• Target demographic characteristics (namely, gender, age, race, nationality, religion, education, occupation, income level, marital status, and other demographic peculiarities of your ideal potential customer);
• Target geographic characteristics (such as climate, continent, country, city your potential customers should live in);
• Target psychographic characteristics (like lifestyle, interests, values, attitudes, and opinions of people who will willingly become your customers);
• Target behavioral characteristics (that include the readiness for spontaneous purchases, customer loyalty, and similar attributes of your customers).

As well, it is essential to find answers to the following questions in case you would like to articulately define your target audience:

• What kind of pain of your potential customer will your product or service solve?
• What level of income should your potential customer have to buy a product or service that you offer?
• Is your potential customer an active user of social media platforms?
• And so on.

Please note: The more common characteristics of your target audience you gather, the more effective digital marketing strategy will you be able to create.

How to Identify Your Target Audience via Market Research?

There exists a great variety of methods of how to identify your target audience. Below, you will find the description of the most widely spread ones:

• Conduct market research that focuses on your current customers. This way, you will be able to see what your existing clients share and how do they differ. Only by knowing this information, you will be able to pinpoint your target audience efficiently;
• Define the benefits of your product or service. Instead of thinking about the features your business has, consider how your product or service will help your potential or existing customers solve their pains. And, after coming up with the list of your advantages, you will understand who would value them;
• Ask your potential or actual customers to participate in a survey. Sounds as easy as pie, right? However, encouraging your target market to participate in your questionnaire is indeed one of the most effective strategies to get to know it better;
• Analyze your competitors. One more efficient way to arrive at your target market is to take a look at the customers of your opponents. In case some successful competitors offer similar to your products or services, run their audience’ research;
• Monitor the latest trends in your niche. You might also take a look at what people who are either interested in or related to your business niche post on their social networks or write on Quora, Reddit, or similar resources. This way, you will be able to know their needs, pains, and opinions first-hand;
• Etc.

After the application of any of the above-mentioned tactics, you will be able to identify your target market pretty well and use your knowledge when creating a selling marketing campaign for your business.

What Marketing Tools Are Useful in Defining Target Audience?

Luckily, there is a great variety of tools that will come in handy when defining the audience you are targeting at. For instance, you might find useful data when working on the portrait of your potential customer with the help of:

• Google Analytics;
• Ahrefs;
• Reddit;
• And many more.

Here is how it works: When looking for fresh insights into your target market, you might appeal to Google Analytics and define the behavioral pattern, the age range, the demographic portrait, and other peculiarities of your website visitors. As well, you might rely on Ahrefs to find relevant for your customer base keywords and search queries. Finally, you might go to Reddit and look at what questions people who are interested in your business niche have. As a result, you will achieve concrete information to create a suitable user persona.

How a Clearly Defined Target Audience Influences Marketing Strategy?

Frankly speaking, your clearly defined target audience data plays an important role in the marketing strategy of your business. The precise understanding of who your potential customer is will help you to:

• Come up with the right marketing message that will be understandable and appealing to your potential clients;
• Use right channels for your business promotion;
• Set up the most appropriate price for your product or service and, as a result, increase your gross revenue;
• And so on.

So, thoroughly thought-out target market segmentation can have an incredible impact on your business and boost it to a new professional level.

A Bottom Line

All in all, the success of your business depends on how well you define the audience you are targeting at. Fortunately, there is a vast variety of methods to identify your perfect focus groups. So, put enough effort into defining your target audience, create suitable marketing campaigns, and see how your revenue grows!