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Understanding your target audience is crucial to all of your marketing strategies. It will help you to choose the right language and creative in your communications, as well as relate to their needs and motivations.
So that you can nail your messaging and boost sales, let’s break down the steps involved to determine your target audience.
Before you dive right in and start selling, conduct market research to determine if there are any gaps or opportunities to target a niche group.
Market research will also be helpful to compare your business against your competitors, and what tactics they are using to reach their target market. Think about what they do well and what their messaging is missing, so you can take advantage of this in your own marketing.
Data analysis can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be a daunting task. If your business is already set up with a website or social media, you can use the tools within existing software to better understand who your audience is and what they want.
Not only can social media and website analytics tools show you key audience demographics, but they show which content they engage with the most, helping to shape your future marketing tactics around your target audience.
Your target audience will have many characteristics that make them relevant to what you offer. To identify these different characteristics, you need to segment your audience. Using your data and research, consider your audience against these four segments:
Geographic – where your audience is based, geographically.
Psychographic – beliefs, motivations, and behaviour.
Demographic – age, gender, income, occupation, education, and marital status.
Behavioural – attitude, loyalty, and occasions to purchase.
Next you need to collate your findings into a buyer persona. You can have one buyer persona or many, depending on how varied your target audience is.
To map this out, list all their details on a page, and give your persona a name, an age bracket, and an occupation. Finally, write down their buyer behaviour and motivations, i.e. how often they purchase and why.
Now that you can envision your target market as a real person, you can more effectively market your offering in a way that appeals to them the most.
