Your brand’s target audience is vital for its overall success. Your target audience is essentially the group of people most likely to buy something from or subscribe to your company. Once you know who your target audience is, you’ll be able to make more compelling and emotionally resonating advertisements, thus drawing more customers to your company and boosting revenue across the board.
Yet determining your business’s target audience can be very tricky. Let’s take a look at six keys you can use to determine your brand’s target audience from scratch.
Consider Your Current/Future Customers
For starters, consider who your current or nearest future customers likely are. If you sell running shoes, for instance, your customers are likely those who like to run recreationally or for fitness, or those who like to participate in events like marathons.
Use some common sense and think about who is likely to use your products as they stand right now. This first step will help you start to narrow down your “real” target audience as a distinct entity from the general population.
Use Online Tools for Keyword Research
The next important step is to use online tools, like SEMrush, to perform keyword research. Keyword research is vital because:
- It allows you to practice search engine optimization or SEO
- It lets you see what people type into the Google search bar when they stumble upon your website
By understanding what people search for specifically, you get a window into their thought processes or what they think about when they buy something from your brand. This, in turn, can give you great insight into how your purchasers think of your company and the internal value they assign to your products.
Use Social Listening Tools
Kevin may also be wise to use social listening tools. Social listening is a data-gathering tactic that lets you discover online conversations about your brand or its products or services. In a nutshell, social listening involves monitoring hashtags, keywords, and other relevant online data to see what people say about your company, particularly on social media platforms.
This is most useful and manageable if you already have a good social media presence. If not, build some social media profile pages quickly. Then start paying attention to what people say about your brand. Once you do this, you’ll know what they think about your company and be able to derive more information about your target audience.
Narrow Down Audience Demographics
Armed with the information gathered from the above tactics, you should now be able to narrow down your target audience demographics based on factors like:
- Age
- Sex
- Location
- And so on
For instance, if your target audience is located in Chicago and probably spends a lot of time driving to and from work, it might be strategic to set up billboards in Chicago advertising your brand or specific products. By narrowing down your audience demographics as specifically as possible, you’ll be able to tailor your marketing efforts to that group or its members’ unique needs or desires.
Build a Consumer Avatar
Once you have your general audience demographics down, you can create a “customer avatar” or consumer avatar, which is essentially a constructed representation of the average customer from that demographic group.
A consumer avatar should include the broad physical and mental characteristics of your average buyer, plus include a back story, their thought processes, and their wants and needs. After building a consumer avatar, you can hand that information out to each of your marketing specialists, enabling them to create advertisements that speak to that hypothetical customer.
Building a consumer avatar is a great way to get in the mindset of your target audience, thus allowing you to market to that audience much more effectively.
Compare Predictions to Results
After you identify your target audience and begin marketing to it, remember that there’s always room for iteration and optimization. You should compare your target audience predictions to the actual results you glean from purchased products or subscriptions.
If, for instance, your target audience was predicted to be people between the ages of 20 and 35 but turned out to be between the ages of 30 and 45, you can update that accordingly in your consumer avatar paperwork, your marketing goals, etc. Never assume that your target audience will stay the same in perpetuity, either. Target audiences can change along with your brand, especially as its identity and tone of voice evolve.
Overall, using these methods to determine your business’s target audience will do wonders for improving the efficacy of your marketing materials and allowing you to get the most bang for your advertising buck. Find your target audience first, then put out compelling and high-converting ads; you’ll see an immediate difference in terms of revenue or store traffic.