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How to Find Your Target Audience
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Any publicity is good publicity. The same doesn’t quite hold true for marketing audiences.
Your brand doesn’t need to reach anyone and everyone. You need to reach the people who are interested in what you have to offer. That’s your target audience.
Once you have your target audience, you can transform your entire marketing strategy. You can advertise on the appropriate channels, create more persuasive content, and make sure you’re focusing on reaching the right people, at the right time, with the right message.
Below we walk you through a three-step strategy to finding your target audience. It involves developing your buyer personas, analyzing your competitors, and using that data to zero in on your target audience.
Step 1: Analyze Your Current Audience
Before you can find your target audience, you need to understand your existing customers. The people already buying your products or using your services are likely to have a lot in common with other people you want to reach.
Take a look at all your customer data. You want to find out as much as you can of the following information:
- Age and/or generation (millennials, Gen Z, etc.)
- Location (city and state is enough, unless you’re a local service business, in which case zip codes can be super insightful)
- Demographic information (gender, education, and income level)
- Hobbies and interests (common TV shows or music artists, exercise, travel, other brands they shop from)
- Spending patterns (couponers vs. big spenders, heavy credit card users vs. fans of non-traditional payment methods like Venmo or Stripe)
- Other qualifiers (new parents, homeowners, pet owners, business role or stage of their career)
Depending on how much data you’ve collected from customers in the past, you’ll probably be able to find at least some of this information (like age, location, and purchasing behavior) from internal sources: your CRM, your email marketing software, and your purchase database.
For help finding the unknowns, dive into the analytics for your social media accounts. These don’t just show you how your posts are performing. They also reveal all kinds of information about your followers, including their demographic makeup, interests, and other accounts they follow:
Step 2: Use This Data to Define Your Buyer Personas
When you can visualize your target customers, it’s easier to develop a marketing strategy for them. Many brands even give their personas names, like HubSpot does in this example:
For each persona, list out their demographic details, spending patterns, hobbies and interests, and the platforms they use to discover brands.
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Step 3: Expand Your Audience with Competitor Analysis
By now you know at least a few types of target people you want to attract. Gut-check your assumptions by taking a look at your competitors.
Look at their website, social media channels, online and offline advertising, and product packaging and positioning. Who do they seem to be going after?
When it comes to finding your target audience, competitor analysis can be a goldmine of information. This step is full of “aha!” moments. For instance, they may have a whole marketing campaign catered for an audience you never even dreamed of! You might find yourself inspired to develop new personas or marketing campaigns.
The key here is to observe your successful competitors. Here are a few places to start sleuthing:
- Discover their traffic sources with a tool like SimilarWeb. If email marketing is a big driver for them, that might be something for you to double down on.
- Find their content footprint with SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, and Buzzsumo. Seeing where your competitors are being mentioned in articles online, or publishing content themselves, is a good indicator of where your audience is hanging out.
- Uncover their digital ads with Moat. You can see whether your competitors are advertising to mobile vs. desktop customers, and get a look at their creative.
Keeping Up With Your Target Audience
Finding your target audience isn’t a one-and-done task. As marketing and advertising channels evolve, so will your audience. Your brand may also grow and expand product lines to reach new types of customers.
Keep up with your evolving audience by monitoring your analytics. Watch how your efforts in various channels boom or bust, and do the same for different campaigns and content formats.Looking to go boom more than bust? Let Your Marketing People help. We specialize in analyzing, testing, and optimizing so our clients can reach the right audiences, on the right channels, with the right content. Contact us today.
