Marketing is useless if you aren’t reaching the right crowd. Sure, your message might be heard by somebody, but if it’s not targeted at a specific group of people, the opportunity for impact will be missed. But what is a target audience?

A target audience is a group of people that share a common characteristic or group of characteristics. By creating content for a target market, your marketing efforts will be better spent and your product or service will reach the people you intend. Let’s talk about how to find your target audience.

Marketing is useless if you’re targeting the wrong crowd. What is a target audience? We can help you reach your target market and grow your customer base. Click To Tweet

Define Your Target Audience

Observe your competition. One of your first steps to defining your target audience is to research what your top competitors are doing. Look at what demographic(s) they’re targeting with their marketing campaigns, and see what strategies are they using. Are they solving a problem? Find a way to solve it better, and target that demographic in your advertising. Are they missing opportunities with potential customers? Fill in those gaps to win over your shared audience. Are they using paid ads on social media to reach customers? Consider doing the same.

Gather your competitor’s audience’s demographic information by clicking the down arrow on the right side of the Facebook ad, then clicking “Why am I seeing this”. There you’ll find the specific audience your competitor chose to target.

Use the data you already have. Your website analytics are a goldmine in terms of valuable information for understanding your audience. Which product listings or service pages get the most views? Your target audience is interested in those. Which blog posts get the most traffic? Your target audience is searching for those topics. Combine that data with pieces of info like customer locations, characteristics of your top customers, how visitors move around your website, et cetera to develop an idea of your target audience’s behavior.

Use Data To Your Advantage

Invest in Google Analytics for a plethora of other useful insights into defining your target audience.

Read your business’s reviews or conduct a survey of your existing customers to gain insight into the wants, needs, and problems your product or service can solve for them. Combine these insights with the data you already have and watch your target audience demographics reveal themselves.

Do offline research too. Whether you’re speaking one-on-one with your customers or scoping out your competitors firsthand, this is all valuable information that can help you define a solid target market.

Know who your audience isn’t. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it can save you lots of wasted time and marketing dollars. Examine the data taken from your unhappy customers (no matter the business, we’ve all got them), and spend your efforts marketing to other audiences. Imagine which demographics would never use your product or service, and don’t bother targeting them.

Don’t get hung up on eliminating demographics from your target audience. No product or service is meant to reach everyone, and ruling out certain demographics strengthens your ability to customize your messaging to customers that matter to your bottom line.

Benefits of a Defined Target Audience

What can you expect when you target your marketing to the right audience?

1. Your advertising dollars will go further because you won’t be wasting money marketing to the wrong audiences.
2. Time is money. No more wasting time on ineffectual marketing and lukewarm leads.
3. You’ll focus on solving your customers’ problems and meeting their needs, gaining clout and respect in your industry.
4. You’ll curate a strong following of folks who value the product or service you’re selling. 

The Cornerstone of Marketing Strategies

Determining your target audience is truly one of the most important strategies in marketing. By investing in market research and time understanding your audience, you’ll save countless hours of frustrating content creation with disappointing ROIs. Cut out the static and reach your audience directly with data-driven insights into who your customers are – and what drives them to buy. 

Design Squid Can Help

Now that you’ve answered the question “what is a target audience?”, you can move on to finding yours and start benefiting from targeted marketing. Design Squid can help with that. 

Contact us to learn more about how targeted marketing can make a difference in your company’s marketing strategy.