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You want to strategically and carefully spend your marketing budget, and doing so starts with understanding your target audience. Broad marketing messages designed to appeal to “everyone” are rarely effective, so defining your target audience will allow you to customize and refine your marketing message to appeal to those individuals most likely to convert into paying customers.
Defining and Understanding Target Audience
Your target audience is a group of people that you want to reach with your marketing, so they will buy your products or services. A target audience shares certain characteristics, like their demographics and interests, that make them a good fit for your business. Once you determine your target audience, you can better focus your marketing efforts to reach these individuals.
What Are the Key Characteristics Used to Define a Target Audience?
Most companies use demographics as a key characteristic to define a target audience. Demographics, or statistical data, might include characteristics like age, location, gender, occupation, income level, and relationship status. Psychographics, including behaviors, interests, and thought processes, are also key characteristics: You might, e.g., define your target audience based on their interests, pain points, values, and spending behavior.
For a practical example, picture a business selling running shoes for men. This brand might define their target audience as being male athletes between ages 18 and 40, with an income level from $50,000 to $120,000, who may participate in competitive running and want an innovative shoe designed to increase foot turnover, and who may be willing to spend more on shoes for a competitive advantage.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience helps you to better refine and focus your marketing efforts. You can also generate higher quality leads, which can help improve conversions. Identifying your target audience is a process, and you’ll need to refine your target audience as your business and its offerings evolve.
What Are the Initial Steps in Defining Your Target Audience?
When you’re first working to define your target audience, it’s helpful to use market research to better understand who your customers are. You can poll customers and ask about factors like their pain points, demographics, and why they chose the products or services they did. Reviews of your business can also reveal information about who your buyers are, why they made a purchase, and what pain points your products are solving.
Looking at competitors’ target audiences is helpful, too. Observe their marketing, including their messaging, and consider who they’re trying to reach and what pain points they’re addressing.
Take the information that you’ve collected and make a list of common characteristics your audience shares. You can continue refining your target audience as you start to better understand your customers.
How Can Market Research Help in Understanding Your Ideal Customer?
Market research is a valuable tool in understanding your ideal customer, and you can perform market research in several ways. The fastest and simplest way to do market research into your target audience is to review existing sources, such as industry publications (which publish information on common trends), demographics, and household incomes within your target industry.
You can also turn to consumers themselves, though this method can be expensive and time-consuming. If you already have a robust social media following or customer base, you can poll your customers and followers to learn more about them. Asking questions about their pain points, demographics, and what they like or would change about your products and services can give you a deeper, more detailed understanding of your audience. In addition to surveys and polls, focus groups and interviews can also help you collect detailed information.
What Are Buyer Personas and How Do They Help in Visualizing Your Target Audience?
Buyer personas are profiles that help you visualize your ideal customer. You can create buyer personas based on your target audience’s common characteristics. For example, let’s say that your clothing brand’s target audience is women aged 30 through 40 who want stylish work clothes that are also highly comfortable. They value products made in the USA and want to avoid harmful chemicals and undesirable manufacturing practices.
Using those characteristics, you could create a buyer persona of Sarah, a 35-year-old communications professional who needs a suitable wardrobe that can keep her comfortable during long workdays. She makes $80,000 per year, often uses Instagram and LinkedIn, and lives outside of Chicago. You can add other details, like the types of publications Sarah reads, the movies and music she enjoys, and what motivates her to make a purchase. This persona can help you better envision a very specific individual within your target audience, so you can more easily tailor your messaging and marketing for maximum effectiveness.
Key Characteristics to Consider
As you define your target audience, you’ll want to include several types of key characteristics to paint a complete picture of your potential and ideal customers.
What Demographic Factors Are Important to Consider?
Demographic factors are easily definable characteristics that you can use to identify your target audience. Some key demographic characteristics include:
- Age.
- Gender.
- Location.
- Income.
- Education.
- Marital status.
- Gender identity.
What Psychographic Factors Influence Your Audience?
Psychographic factors are also important. These factors help define how your target audience thinks, like:
- Values.
- Beliefs.
- Interests.
- Lifestyle.
- Attitudes.
- Morals.
- Expectations.
- Pain points.
What Behavioral Factors Are Relevant?
Your audience’s behavioral factors are essential, since they can affect how your audience decides to make purchases, how they engage with your business, and more. Include factors such as:
- Purchase history.
- Interactions with your brand.
- Website history.
- Purchase intention.
How Do Needs and Pain Points Define Your Target Audience?
If your product or service addresses the audience’s pain points, they’re more likely to be motivated to make a purchase from your business. If your product or service doesn’t address those pain points, though, you’re not helping them to solve a problem, so it will be more difficult to motivate them to buy. Chances are, if your offerings don’t align with their needs and pain points, you’re looking at the wrong target audience.
Reaching Your Target Audience
How Does Understanding Your Target Audience Inform Your Choice of Advertising Channels?
Defining and understanding your target audience gives you valuable information that you can use to strategically choose your advertising channels. Different demographics tend to use different advertising channels, such as social media marketing, influencer marketing, radio, direct mail, and email marketing.
For example, according to the Pew Research Center, 93% of U.S. adults ages 18 through 29 use YouTube, but just 38% of that same demographic uses X. When you know the specific demographic you’re trying to reach, you can focus on the advertising channels they use most often, so your marketing is more likely to be successful.
Understanding your target audience can also help you determine your timing and frequency of communication. A younger demographic like adults ages 18 through 29 are used to seeing frequent marketing messaging, so you might increase your frequency to help your messaging stand out from all of the other ads. But, if you’re marketing to seniors, they could see such frequent messaging as being overwhelming and pushy. You can adjust your frequency based on what you know about your target audience and how they’re likely to receive your messaging.
How Can You Use Audience Insights for Personalization?
Having detailed audience insights is also helpful when personalizing your marketing messaging. Once you’ve identified your target audience’s interests, pain points, and buying motivation, you can craft more personalized marketing messages that address and reflect those characteristics. Such personalized marketing can make a strong impression on your audience, increasing its effectiveness and prompting your audience to take action, whether that’s following your brand on social media or learning more about a product by visiting your website.
Evolving Your Understanding of Your Target Audience
Your job isn’t done once you’ve defined your target audience — it’s important to continuously develop and evolve your understanding of them.
Why Is It Important to Continuously Refine Your Understanding of Your Target Audience?
Consumer behaviors and market dynamics continuously change, so your target audience’s interests, buying motivations, and pain points may have dramatically changed from what they were a year ago. If you release new products or services, they may appeal to a slightly or even entirely different target audience. Rebranding can also mean it’s time to change your target audience.
Continuously refining your understanding of your target audience helps ensure that you’re truly marketing to the right potential customers. View your target audience as a continuously evolving group of people to keep your strategy accurate and effective.
How Can You Use Data and Analytics to Track Changes in Your Audience?
Analytics and data inform your initial understanding of your target audience, and they’re also useful in tracking changes in your audience. Your social media analytics can help you spot changes and new trends in who is following your pages, which can be an important source of demographic information. Web analytics tools, like Google Analytics, can provide you with information on website visitor demographics, brand interactions, and purchase behaviors. You can also use AI to analyze large amounts of data, and this technology may be able to spot trends or changes that you haven’t yet identified.
Don’t forget that your current audience of social media followers and customers is also a valuable resource. You can gather feedback from your audience through polls, focus groups, and surveys, which can help you improve your products and services, your marketing messaging, and your understanding of what matters most to your audience.
Key Takeaways
Understanding your target audience is essential for effectively marketing your business. Many tools can help you determine the key characteristics that define your target audience, and you can then use that information to craft effective messaging on the channels they use. Since your target audience can evolve over time, it’s important to continuously expand your understanding of them to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Can a business have more than one target audience?
Yes, a business can have multiple target audiences. That’s particularly true for businesses that offer a range of products and services which may appeal to different audiences.
What are some common mistakes in defining a target audience?
Many businesses make their target audience too broad and try to appeal to nearly everyone. Doing so can cause your marketing to miss the mark, since it’s not personalized to a particular demographic. Other common errors include not performing enough research and not refining and evolving the target audience over time.
How does a target audience differ from a marketing persona?
Your target audience is the large, broad group of people you want to reach with your marketing; hopefully these people will buy your products or services. A marketing persona is a highly detailed profile of a hypothetical person that could be in your target audience. The marketing persona helps you to better visualize an individual in your target audience, which can make it easier to understand whom you’re marketing to and how to refine your marketing messages.
What tools can help me identify and analyze my target audience?
There are many tools to help identify and analyze your target audience. Social media analytics can provide valuable information on your follower demographics and interests, while your own website analytics can help you better understand website visitor demographics, interactions, and buying behavior.
