How To Find Your Target Audience In 5 Simple Steps

Establishing a target audience is a critical step in making sure the correct tone and messaging techniques are being used during your campaigns.

Getting to know the group of people that you’re aiming your brand at is a crucial element to your business success.

If your brand isn’t appealing to your intended audience, then there’s not much chance of it succeeding.

The primary reason for addressing target audiences is that not all products can be consumed or offered to all customers.

That is, every product or service has its own ideal market demographic, and not chasing the right segment can have negative effects on your bottom line.

What Exactly Is a Target Audience?

They are a group of people who are buying your products or using your services. Essentially, your customers!

Your audience is going to be made up of people with similar qualities.

Defining your target audience should still be pretty straightforward, you just might have to think a little bit harder.

How to Find Your Target Audience

Finding your target audience is a process and one which requires that you follow each step carefully.

It is essential to set a target-able, reachable audience. You must choose who the primary consumer or customer is for your product — otherwise, you won’t be able to measure success, let alone obtain it.

By finding that target audience, you can tailor or craft messages that appeal specifically to that group, to ensure that it is striking a chord with them, and ultimately gain their attention.

Skipping or ignoring this step can lead to a badly-defined target audience that underperforms.

1. Carry Out a Brand Audit

One of the first steps in identifying your target audience is to consider who your current customers are.

You should be able to figure this out quite easily by evaluating your product and analyzing what value it offers the public.

• Who wants to buy it the most?
• Who does it benefit?

2. Refine Your Target Audience

Once you’ve completed your brand audit, you should have a good picture of who currently makes up your brand’s audience. However, you still need to ask yourself: Is it the ideal audience for my product/service?

In order to figure this out, you need to take a good, long look at the demographics that are currently in your audience and the ones you think should be within your current target.

If these demographics don’t match up, then you’ll need to reconsider who you’re targeting.

Ask yourself these same questions over and over again — eventually, you’ll end up with your perfect target audience. Or, at least, nearly perfect.

3. Be Confident in Your Decision

You need to be confident that targeting this audience will generate a profit.

If you have doubts about this audience — whether they’re the right for your product or service or whether they can afford your products — then it’s safest to go back to step one and revaluate.

4. Define Your Buyer Personas

There’s no reason to think that your brand’s target audience won’t change over time — their needs, interests, and desires.

And when they do change, your brand may no longer be on your customers’ radars. To keep on target, it’s important that you create an audience persona or personas.

These personas will contain certain characteristics, demographics, and interests that match those of your target customers.

Don’t keep this information to yourself — let everyone know. Then everyone in your company will be on the same page, targeting the right kind of people.

5. Create a Plan

When you’re about to launch an exciting new marketing campaign, it’s sometimes hard not to get a little ahead of yourself.

Because if you let all that excitement go to your head, you could end up blindly shooting off campaigns and forgetting about your target audience.

To ensure each campaign reaches the right people, you need to know which channels your target audience is likely to check on a regular basis. Running your campaigns on these channels will result in higher user engagement.

How can you figure out what the best channels are? Check to see what your competitors are doing and where they’re rolling out their targeted campaigns.

The takeaway? Always have a solid, thought-out plan for your campaigns. This ensures that you’re aiming for the right audience. Releasing a campaign without a plan is never a good approach!

Summary

There is no getting around it — defining your target audience is an essential step to becoming a successful brand.

Getting it right means you’ll outperform your competitors and your target audience will be naturally drawn to your brand. And more customers mean higher profits!

So, if you follow these five steps we’ve laid out, you’ll no longer have to worry that you aren’t targeting the right audience. And once you do, you’ll be ever closer to creating and maintaining a strong brand identity!

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