Having a clear understanding of the target audience should be part of each marketer’s priority list
But wait! What does a target audience mean? It is a specific group of people who display similar characteristics and are most likely to be interested in your content, products, and services.
Thus, there’s no doubt that knowing your core audience is central to every marketing strategy and to do so, you need to get into the right process. Here are 4 well-defined steps that you can apply to define your target audience.
1. Understand Your Customer Base
To define your target audience, you need to first understand the people already purchasing from you, following you, and engaging with your posts. Profiling and modeling your existing customer list as per demographic, psychographic, and geographic distributions are necessary. Don’t forget, you also need to identify the reasons why they buy from you.
And here comes an interesting question, “how to do it?” You can try amazing tools like Facebook Audience Insights and Google Analytics to get valuable insights about your customers’ age, gender, location, interests as well as behavior. As such, you can segment your customers properly and grow your customer base by targeting prospects who fall in similar categories.
2. Check Out Your Competition
Wondering why you need to keep track of who your competitors are targeting and how they are or they are not meeting their needs? Well, this is where you will find new opportunities to take your business to the next level. You will be able to focus on your potential differentiators, that is the features and benefits that set your products or services apart from your competitors, and thus, fill the gaps where they are missing out.
Here, you can use tools like BuzzSumo and Hootsuite Streams to track your competition better. If you make use of your competitors’ insights effectively, you can even make a niche market out of those that your competitors are overlooking and stay ahead in a challenging business environment. So are you ready to solve your prospects’ problems?
3. Social Listening Matters
Are you listening closely to what your audience is saying? If not, you need to! Analyze common comments, reviews, complaints, and questions so that you can understand the general sentiment of your audience around your brand. This will help you know what they truly value about your brand and what changes or improvements they are expecting from you. As such, you can adapt your services and campaigns according to their patterns of behavior to offer a more positive and personalized experience.
4. Create Audience Personas
After analyzing your existing customers and competition as well as engaging in social listening, it becomes easier to create buyer personas for your business. This allows cross-departmental alignment as everyone in the organization has the same view of your ideal customer and thus, is able to deliver a unified brand message to your target audience. In other words, you can create more powerful marketing strategies that suit their needs and expectations better and build long-lasting relationships with them.