How to Find a Target Audience
Are you finding it hard to find your target market? This guide will take you through the way toward knowing and understanding who your customers are and how to find them.
Before you can create content that resonates, it helps to know your intended audience (as well as who they are not). An audience definition should ideally connect these three things:
- Your product or service
- Your main audience demographic
- Your content’s mission
Here is what a simple audience definition could look like once you’re finished analyzing your audience:
- INSERT YOUR BRAND – creates content to help and inform.
- INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC so you can reach them.
- INSERT ACTION so they can know better what to do
A company or organization will never be successful without realizing their target market and who buys their items or services. Discovering this demographic ought to be one of your top priorities. All endeavors are squandered if you don’t have any clients. Thus, your target market is the major reason for your existence.
How about we take a look at the way of finding your target audience.
What Is a Target Audience or Market?
A target audience is a group of individuals that an organization wants to sell its items and services to. This group is made out of people with similar needs and wants that an organization wishes to serve.
Knowing the target audience is the first step in making a business plan. It is an essential part to building a marketing plan. Without the correct target audience, an organization will basically flop in its endeavors to make progress. A target market can be characterized utilizing the following parameters Demographic, Geographical, Behavioral and Psychographic factors.
The Importance of Identifying the Target Audience
Your target audience is one of the principle reasons behind your accomplishment in business. The following are the reasons why or of significance to accurately find your target audience. Knowing your target audience makes you center around the essential parts of your business.
The target audience is significant to creating your item and services. Distinguishing your audience enables marketers to create messages and campaign explicitly for them.
You can save money on advertising costs if you know your target audience. Your efforts are calculated and increasingly centered, thus avoiding the expenses of focusing on individuals who aren’t keen on your products or services.
By concentrating on your target audience, you can accomplish market intensity. You can contend with different players in the business.
Finding Your Content Core
The purpose of the content core exercise is to understand the difference between what you do, and what you need to talk about. One of the big mistakes that early content marketers make is to talk about themselves and their product, rather than the things that their users really care about. This is a huge misunderstanding of what it means to find your target audience.
Talk about what your audiences cares about (not yourself).
Of course, your product is helpful to your customers, but that doesn’t mean that it will also be helpful to your blog audience, that group of potential customers is probably interested in a much greater variety of topics.
However, it should not be all you write about. You should also spend time writing about the ideas that surround these topics. This is the big idea behind “expanding your content core.”
As we move away (ever so slightly) from our content core and focus on what our target audience really wants to hear about, we improve the effectiveness of our content marketing and better focus on our target audience’s needs.
Pointers in Finding Your Target Market
Before understanding your clients, you need to first find them. With billions of individuals around the globe, and with a high level of the populace going digital, it is important that you discover your target audience. Attempt to see the bigger picture to discover who deserves your attention and assistance.
Here are a couple of significant hints on the best way to find your target audience:
1. Explore Your Network
Look at your organizations, affiliations, graduated class gatherings or simply your neighborhood associations to check whether there is something they need. Take a look at them and check what items they are using. Likewise, make a few inquiries. Let’s say, you have this specific product, and would they use it? If not, why? The info they give might be beneficial to you.
2. Check Your Current Client Database:
A survey is only as good as the insights you gain from it. Here are a few tips to make yours as useful as possible:
- Know what you want to learn from each question.
- Make questions short and easy to answer. This can help improve the odds that people will complete it.
- Think hard about whether to offer a giveaway for taking a survey. They may help increase participation. However, some folks might only respond to get a prize.
If you are making a totally new concept, yet battle to pinpoint a specific target audience, the best thing for you to do is search your own customer database. Who are your present clients? What else might they need? Among your existing clients, who gets more business for you? These people can be a promising target audience for any new ideas you may have.
3. Competition Matters
Research your rivals – their clients may be yours, as well. Knowing your competitors, where they are, what they are doing and how they are executing strategies can profit you. In this way, exploit any info you can get from your competitors.
4. Take a Look at Demographic Data
Take a look at your requirements and check the market’s demographic information. Think about these Demographic factors:
Age
Gender
Location
Marital Status
Social Class
Income Level
Educational Attainment
Occupation
5. Offer Importance to Psychographic Details
Discovering your target audience is something beyond identifying their age, gender, or social class. A potential target audience must have a set of needs. Also, you can without much of a stretch discover your target audience if you know how they behave, what they do and what they are thinking.
As a marketer or entrepreneur, know what things appeal most to your target audience. What kind of media would they say they are utilizing? Survey your potential target advertise through the following psychographic data.
Conduct
Character
Individual Values
hobbies
Lifestyle
6. Go Out and Try It Yourself
The best teacher is experience due to the hands-on involvement. Probably the most ideal approaches to find your target audience is to go out and study the surrounding environment. This should be possible by pretending that you are a client trying out things or just exploring different ideas. This is research in its most pure form.
Here is an example. You actually belong to the food industry, and you need to open a cafe. Observe your potential market by sitting in a cafe. Watch the clients and the café personnel as they go through their day. Attempt to respond to these inquiries:
What are the customers ordering?
Pay attention to their client profile. What is the age run? What amount do they spend by and large?
Is there a specific item that is most looked for after?
Are clients dining in or taking out requests?
When is the busiest time for the shop?
Are people coming in as groups or separately?
7. Explore the World Wide Web
Alternatives in the Digital World are interminable. Anything can occur there; clients can get to anything they want or need, information is boundless. With this, make sure to exploit the Internet.
Watch the conduct of a potential target audience through social media. You can likewise check how potential contenders are getting along. Also, you can think about your future clients’ mindset through the remarks and surveys they are giving different players or brands.
If utilized accurately, the internet has info you can use to find your target audience. Exploit it and make it work for you.
8. Find Your Target Audience On Facebook With Facebook Insights
Facebook provides every Page owner with a powerful set of insights (analytics) that are free for you to use anytime you want. From here, you can quickly determine the demographic of your most active users and determine the topics that they share in common.
Start by visiting your Facebook page. Click the Insights tab:
Next, click People:
Here, you’ll find everything you need to understand your Facebook audience.
9. Find Your Target Audience On Twitter By Connecting To Your Twitter Followers Dashboard
Twitter also provides an excellent followers’ dashboard that you can access if you sign up for a Twitter Ads account.
This dashboard does an excellent job of telling you what your followers’ are interested in—specifically listing common topics and other Twitter accounts that your followers’ have in common. This is powerful information that goes way beyond basic demographic details.
10. Monitor Your Social Activity
Which social networks do your readers share your content on the most?
This little of information can actually tell you a lot about what they like and want to hear about. In fact, when we analyzed nearly 1 million headlines in the CoSchedule system, we found that the tone and topics covered on each network varied wildly. These simple hints provide clues about who you are writing for and will help you find your target audience.
This process can be as simple as monitoring your social accounts daily and making note of who’s interacting with your content. Pay attention to their bios. This can tell you a lot about who you’re currently reaching (and whether those folks are the right folks to reach).
11. Ask for Audience Feedback With An Automated Email
When users subscribe to one of our email mailing lists, they are automatically added to an email queue that will ping them about 30 days after they sign up to see if they are enjoying our content.
The purpose of this email is to solicit a response that usually generates meaningful conversation if the reader has something to share. We also use this tactic frequently with the users of our application.
By engaging with your audience personally, you can develop a relationship and an open channel for communication and feedback.
Here’s how to set up such an email using several of top email marketing platforms:
12. Talk To Your Social Followers
You can learn a lot by being an active member in your own community on social media. Follow these tips:
- Make an effort to respond to every comment and message you receive. Every interaction with your audience is an opportunity to learn more about them.
- Find relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups and participate. Getting involved in discussions related to your niche or industry can provide incredible insight into what’s important to your audience.
- Create posts occasionally asking your audience what they’re interested in. What are their top problems? What do they do outside the office? What products or features do they wish they had? These are a just a few topical ideas you can easily turn into Twitter polls.
3 Tactics For Identifying What Your Audience Wants To Read
1. Get Out Of The Building
One of the early lessons that we learned here at CoSchedule was that it simply isn’t enough to ask our readers a question or two via a survey. That method can be mechanical and too far removed from what people really want to say, missing the deep emotional information you need.
So, in addition to all of these other methods, it is also helpful (and necessary) to “get out of the building.” In other words—talk to your readers face-to-face. It’s super important to get out and talk to your readers face-to-face.
Depending on your location, this may be harder than it sounds. At CoSchedule, we conducted most of our face-to-face interviews over a Google+ Hangout, but that didn’t make them any less valuable.
As a content marketer, you can easily choose a few frequent readers to interview in a one-on-one setting.
You will be surprised at how most of them are accommodating and willing to talk. Once you get them talking, you will also be surprised at how helpful they can be.
Don’t merely settle for stats and numbers when you attempt to find your target audience. Your audience isn’t stats and numbers; they are people.
The beauty of the web is that you can understand and reach them with helpful and insightful content that is targeted directly at them.
2. Use Ubersuggest And Google’s Keyword Planner Tool
When people need to know something, the first thing they often do is turn to Google. Here’s a quick way to learn a lot about your audience, fast.
Enter a topic or keyword into Ubersuggest. Start with a keyword that’s core to your business
Upload the.csv file into Google’s Keyword Planner. To do this, log in and select “Get search volume and trends.” Then, click “Upload File”:
You now have a ton of keyword options, all seeded by terms people have actually entered into Google searches.
Now, export this data from the Keyword Planner and open the.csv file:
As you skim through this data, look for two things:
- Keywords related to issues, interests, and concerns you’ve learned about your audience using tactics mentioned prior in this post.
- Keywords that also have a decent level of search volume.
This will leave you with a loose idea of which topics people are most interested in reading about.
3. Analyze Your Competitors’ Top Performing Content
Before creating content around a given keyword or topic, try searching it with BuzzSumo. While a paid account is necessary to get the most from this tool, it offers enough power for free to be useful.
Wrapping Up
A devoted entrepreneur is consistently client driven in light of the fact that the achievement of their business begins with knowing its customer base. They are the core of everything.
Discovering your objective market is never simple at first. Yet, when you find your clients, everything else will become alright. This includes creating the correct items or services, setting up prices, distribution channels and promotional activities.
