Identifying who you want to sell your product or service to is important, that is why in this article we will understand, what is the target audience. And how to find them?
What is the target audience?
A target audience means the people that will have an interest in your company’s product or service and will most probably be your customers.
Normally you can think of them as a group of people that have similar demographic traits, which include the following:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Education
Why is the target audience important in digital marketing?
Knowing your target audience will make it much easier for you to make your marketing strategies, make the right strategy, and use the social media channel that they are more likely to use. Instead of spending your money on meaningless strategies to attract any customer.
Defining your customers will help you know who your customers are and upon which you can make the right marketing strategy that will definitely work.
Think of it like advertising your product to the customers who need to buy your product, those are the people that will most probably be willing to buy what you offer.
For example, if you sell women’s shoes, your target audience will be women. So instead of advertising your product to everyone you better limit the advertising to reach your potential consumers directly. This way you will gain more money.
What is a digital target audience?
Digital target audience or target audience both are the same. They are the people that are most likely would buy or have an interest in the product or service you offer. Think of it as the group of people that are interested in your product that has some similar traits like age, location, income, interest, and so many more.
What is an example of a target audience?
Word processing software target audience example:
When you analyze your audience, they will most likely be:
- professional writers
- editors
- students
- academics
If you want to target them all you must keep in mind that you can’t reach them by using the same methods or content.
Another example is the gardening tools & supplies:
Your potential customers might be:
1- a customer that loves gardening and takes it as a Hobby.
2- A gardener that wants to make his/her garden more beautiful.
3- Someone who wants to save food money by growing his/her own vegetables.
4- Someone who prefers organic food over processed food.
By looking at the potential customers you can see that they all want the gardening tools for different reasons and that they are facing different challenges.
What is a target audience analysis?
Target audience analysis means knowing your potential customer’s demographic traits like age, location, income, interest, and so many more.
There are many target audience analysis tools that you can use to identify your audiences like target audience templates, target audience generators, and many more.
How do you analyze the target audience?
In this section, we will learn how to find your target audience that will save you time and money. Here is what you should do:
- Buyer personas: try to determine who will benefit from your product, and know their demographic data, interests, and purchase behavior. This way you will have your picture of the ideal customer.
- Surveys: use surveys to know from your customers what interest them, their hobbies, age, education, and similar Question that will help you know more about them. There is many free survey software that you could use. For example, you could use google forms which is easy to use and most people know how to use it.
- Google Analytics: this is an effective tool to collect data about your audience like demographics data and online behavior.
- Similarweb: this tool provides you with the required tools to analyze your target by investigating your competitor’s audience demographic information and behavior and comparing your target audience with theirs.
- Social media: use social media analytics tools that will make it easier to understand and know your audience better.
- Social media monitoring: there are social media monitoring tools that you can use to get more information about what people say about you and your competitors’ products.
- Salesforce: use your sales to collect information about your current customers, and identify their similarities and interests.
- Feedback via email, or website: ask your customers for their feedback, encourage them to write you a review, and engage with your products.
- Competitors’ websites: investigate your competitors’ websites, see what they do and what makes people like them.
How do you find the target audience for digital marketing?
To know and define your target audience you must first spend time analyzing the data you receive, using these data to know the similarities between the buyers.
How do you identify your target audience?
1- Establishing demographics:
Collecting and identifying the right demographic data will help you plan your marketing strategies and how to better advertise your product whether by Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
The data you want to collect and define include:
- Age: if you are selling mass-market chocolate or candy then you want to target young people, however, if you are selling high-quality handmade craft chocolate then your audience will be older consumers as they will be the ones who know and value this kind of product.
- sex: this one is easy to understand, if you are selling women’s shoes then your target audience will of course be women.
- employment or specific roles: if your product is targeting to solve for example managers or HR problems then they are the ones that you will try to sell your product to.
- education: the background of your customers plays a big role in their choices.
- Income: people who have low income will be searching for what fulfills their needs, while people with high income will be looking for products that are in accordance with their lifestyle or values.
- interests: you can target potential customers based on their interests and hobbies.
- from movies to travel destinations.
2- Getting psychographic data:
The psychographic data help you know the customers based on their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria. It allows you to know the motivations of the buyers. However, defining these kinds of data is a bit challenging as it’s all about subjective information, unlike the hard statistical data that demographic data relies on.
Here are the main questions you want to answer:
- What are the interests of your target audience?
- What kind of activities (often hobbies) do they take part in?
- What are their attitudes/opinions towards particular subjects?
Now that you know what are the answers you are looking for it is time to get started with collecting the data. Here are the methods that you could use to gather psychographic data:
- Make a survey
- Interview existing clients
- Research websites and forums they visit
- Analyze your website analytics
- Make use of powerful analytic tools like:
- Contentsquare (Behavioural tool)
- CrazyEgg (Heatmap tool)
- Qualaroo (Customer & User Feedback Software)
- Wunderkind (Behavioural tool)
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