Who, What, Why, and Where? How to Define Your Target Audience
Making assumptions about who your customers are and what they’re looking for is extremely ineffective and often a complete waste of time and money. If you’re struggling to define your target audience and would like to learn more about researching and discovering who they are and how to target them, keep reading for some simple ways to do so.
Look at Your Existing Customers
By taking a look at your existing customers and working out what’s giving you results can provide valuable insights. Look at how often your customers buy from you and what they tend to buy and then determine whether your customers are happy by asking yourself what you can do to engage and better align with your customers.
Of course, none of this works if you don’t have a way to know where your customers are. Find out what social media platforms they’re in, what stores they shop in etc.
Know What Your Customers Want
Discovering what your customer wants and providing them with the means of getting it is one of the most personal ways of getting to know your target audience. By empathizing with them and showing them that you understand their problems, you’ll have deeper insights into what motivates them – something you can use to inform your marketing strategy.
Psychographics, Demographics and Persona
Using interviews and surveys, you can segment people by their behavior, attitudes and values. Next, find out target demographics. Think of things like age, gender, location, buying behavior and education levels. Finally, create the target persona. This is like a character you develop based on the market research you’ve been doing. Include interests, lifestyle, general social engagement, and other personal characteristics.
Social Listening
Monitor who is already following you on social media because this will allow you to gain insights into who they are and how they are thinking. Although this is useful, make sure you go a little further to find out what information your potential customers are looking for.
Scrutinizing the feedback your posts get will work towards you becoming more thoughtful about the ways in which you approach your audience and help them to get what they’re looking for.
Study the Competition
Using your competition as an asset is a great way to determine your target audience if you’re struggling. Often, they will have the same or very similar target audiences. So, ask yourself what you can do differently and deliver that your competitors aren’t able to. Ask yourself how they are reaching their customers. The key here is making sure that you’re not copying your competitors but doing something even better.
Make Use of Google Analytics to Shape Your SEO Search
Most people turn to google when they want to know something, so you can tap in to google analytics to find key information to help you define your target audience. If you want to know where your visitors live, how often they visit your website, which of your website’s pages are most popular or a whole host of other things, check out Google Analytics and see how they can help you.
