Every brand marketer and business owner should be able to identify their target audience in the blink of an eye. Knowing who you are addressing allows you to understand the customers better and get them on your side. In the end, it allows you to create a wholesome digital marketing strategy that clicks.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
But the truth is that many companies still don’t know who they target with their marketing efforts. That’s either because they don’t know how to identify their audience or where to find it. Knowing and understanding your target market is the key to successful marketing.
According to a statistical analysis by Statista, almost half of the world’s population uses at least one social media platform. To be more exact, 2.95 billion of all human beings used some form of social media in 2019. And the numbers are only growing.
So you can see how the trend is going towards social media platforms. But there are several other effective ways to find your preferred audience.
What Does Target Audience Mean?
Before we dive into the how, let’s discuss the what. To be more precise, what exactly is a target audience?
It is a segment of the consumer market that is the most likely to be interested in your service or product. As a result, this audience should be the focus of most (if not all) of your marketing efforts.
This means you should be able to recognize your target audience demographics, their education, their vocation, their pain points, objectives, and other factors that will play a part in their decision to make a purchase.
Where to Find Your Target Audience?
You may be wondering what the secret is to zero in on those who will be most interested in what you have to offer them. You’ll be happy to hear there are clear steps for you to follow if you want to know how to find your target audience.
1. Conduct a Deep Analysis of Your Google Analytics Data
Finding your target audience in marketing boils down to data and knowing how to use it. Google Analytics is one of the primary means of collecting data about your website visitors. It gives you valuable information which can then be used to your advantage.
Information surrounding target audience demographics such as their age, job, what social media channels they use, and much more becomes vital when putting together your marketing campaigns.
You can also go more in-depth and collect psychographic data with custom audience reports including their personal interests, values, attitudes, and more.
2. Recognize the Target Audience that Would Benefit from Your Product/Service
Building your awareness of your audience as a marketer is the key of digital marketing. It’s the primary requirement to be successful in today’s congested industries.
This makes it essential that you focus on your benefits, not your features. Find out what the advantages of your product or service are, and recognize who would benefit from your services.
For example, if you’re a digital marketing consultant for business owners, then you should look for companies who have no time or skills to do online marketing on their own.
3. Review Quora to See What Questions are Being Asked
Take a look at online question-and-answer websites and analyze what the users are asking about. Quora is one of the most popular online forums out there with millions of various questions and answered being submitted every day.
When you enter Quora, there is a search bar at the top where you can enter anything you’re interested in. Search for something that comes from your field of expertise and take a look at the questions currently being asked there.
This can give you valuable information concerning how your prospects think. You can easily identify their pain points, what are their most common questions, and how you can help them.
4. Participate in Facebook Groups Within Your Niche
As of 2019, Facebook had more than 2 billion active users, and that number is only going up. You can see just how vast the Facebook market is, which makes it the perfect social media platform to identify your customers on.
One of the best parts is there are thousands of Facebook Groups spanning a wide range of industries and interests. What you’ll want to do is find Facebook Groups in your niche, and identify potential customers there. The more users a group has, the better.
These groups can give you valuable insight about your potential customers. You can scan the questions that are asked and gain crucial information about your audience.
5. Search for LinkedIn Groups of Interest
Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers plenty of groups where you can find your potential customers. Primarily, the platform is aimed towards a more professional approach and mainly caters to B2B companies.
If you do a search for “affiliate marketing”, you’ll likely find a handful of jobs and companies. But if you toggle to “Groups” in the advanced search settings, you’re bound to find some good groups where you can see what the discussion is about.
6. Conduct a Proper Twitter Search for a Target Market
Since we’re already hot on social media, let’s also mention Twitter. It might not be as extensive or involved as Facebook or LinkedIn but with 330 million active users, it’s likely people within your target audience can be found here.
There are some very useful communities on Twitter where you’ll find key details about your target demographics. You can search via a hashtag search, or you can go through advanced search and locate communities of interest there. It can be a great source of information about your potential audience.
7. Research Your Competitors’ Target Audience
This doesn’t necessarily mean copying your competition and their tactics of reaching out to the target market. However, you can learn a great deal by analyzing your competition as well as how and where they find their audience.
With tools like SimilarWeb, BuzzSumo, or SEMRush, you can easily see what your competitors are doing. It allows you to see where they get traffic, how often they post content, what tone they use, and much more.
This sort of insight will allow you to create a marketing strategy that addresses your target market more effectively than your competitors and will help you understand how to find your target audience.
8. Crawl Through the Relevant Forums
Your goal as a marketer should be to find as many opinions, information, and customer questions as possible. This might require you to search through the web extensively, including various forums.
While we have already mentioned Quora, there are plenty of other forums online worthy of a check-up.
The challenge is finding the relevant forums for your business and industry. With an effective search on Google, you’ll quickly discover hundreds of new places where your target audience is ready and waiting for you.
9. Combine the Numbers and the Information You Found
Once you’ve taken the necessary steps, you should be able to round up the information gathered from analytics and from other platforms and create your target audience demographics. Combine everything you have learned so far and create a plan to engage with these companies or individuals.
Put together a list of relevant questions, and try to answer them on your website. Identify the pain points, address them in your SEO content, and in your marketing campaign as a whole.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Understanding why your target market is important should be your primary goal as a marketer or business owner. The importance of addressing the right target audience in marketing is growing by the day.
Even more important is knowing how to communicate with them and keep them engaged.
If you know who you are talking to and who your potential customers are, it will be significantly easier for you to create a strategy. With the help of these tips, you can create an unbeatable marketing plan that leads to results.
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