5 Ways To Identify Your Target Audience In 2023
Knowing your target audience is a critical aspect of the content creation process, say written content for example. The better you know your audience, the more readers you can attract and hopefully retain. Now, think about it. A business website or blog will not convert visitors into customers if it does not address their needs, and people are more likely to become your customer if they feel that you understand them.
Join AClasses Content Academy if you want to learn more about Content Creation Strategy and how to leverage content for your Business.
In today’s digital world, content is king. To be successful in marketing and content creation, one needs to know who their target audience is and what they need from them. What interests them in your content and why should they subscribe to your website or blog? Now, let’s understand it even better.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is your intended audience or the consumer of your content. For example, the target audience for this article are people who are interested in learning how to identify their own Target Audience.
By the end of this article, you will learn how to identify your “Target Audience”, and the different strategies that will help you do so.
In general, a target audience may be influenced by several factors such as:
- Age gender,
- Income,
- Location,
- Interests and more.
We will talk much about these, later in the article.
In order to target your potential buyers most effectively, your business needs to be able to identify and pinpoint the groups of individuals who have the highest likelihood of making a purchase from you. That is what those 4 points are needed for.
By doing so, you are able to save time and money in the long term by investing in effective marketing efforts and generating leads.
Know your current customers
The more you understand your customers, the better. Understanding them not only helps you to offer better customer service but also helps you to sell your products and services. To know your customers, you need to think of them as individuals and not just as numbers.
Doing this is easier said than done, but there are tools and ways that can help you out. Let’s look at customer surveys and social media, for example:
– Surveys
The simplest way to ask customers what they want is through surveys. Surveys will give you a wealth of information about how they feel, concerning what they bought from you or what they want from your future products.
With the touch of a button, you can create a survey and reach out to your customers with it.
Recently, there has been a rise in the use of survey tools in the business world. Many companies use surveys to gain valuable insights from their customers and employees.
These insights can help grow their customer base or make better decisions about how to allocate their resources and staffing. Surveys are a great way for businesses to get more data on what they need to improve and better develop.
– Social Media
Social media is another great way for small businesses to interact with their target audience and find out more about the target market’s needs. It also allows companies to create a social presence that would not have been possible before.
While still on the tools to help you better identify your audience, it’s important to remember that your target audience can either be primary or secondary. Let’s find out more about that as the second way to identify your target audience.
Primary vs. secondary target audiences & how to decide between the two
Your primary target audience is the group of people that is the main focus of your marketing strategy. For example, the African diaspora community. That is the audience you are trying to sell to the most.
The secondary target audience on the other hand is a group of people that are not necessarily targeted by your marketing strategy or campaign but are still relevant to you.
It’s important to know whom your primary and secondary audiences are before making any decisions about what content you produce or how you market yourself because every decision will depend on which one you are targeting. I hope that makes sense to you.
Collect enough demographic data on your target audience
Collecting the right data on your audience is important for targeting them with the right message. If you have read the history of AClasses Content Academy, you will understand that we are coming from a research background about the presence of Africans in northern Italy.
What the research background helped us to do is to have a clearer understanding of the common problems of our demography and to propose a suitable solution to them. That explains why the project remains an online training platform for members of the African diaspora community who want to learn about Content Creation and the power of storytelling.
Now, data can be collected through surveys, as we have discussed earlier, which can be distributed in various ways.
Before you can create effective content for your audience as a small business, you need to learn about their interest, spending power, and patterns. You need this information to better develop marketing campaigns, products, or services that will resonate with your customers.
Marketing is all about understanding who your audience is and what they want. The more you know about them, the more likely you are to be able to provide them with an offer they cannot refuse. As I have already mentioned, consider the following about your audience:
- Location – Are they reachable to you, face-to-face, like in a small town or international audience?
- Age – How old are they on average, so you know how to communicate with them?
- Language – What language do they understand, do you need some translation?
- Interest – What are they interested in and what would they rather spend their hard-earned money on?
- Challenges – What challenges are they facing that might need your urgent attention and much more?
There is no limit to the amount of information you can gather about your audience because the more you know about them, the more you can better serve them. A company that has done this perfectly is Amazon. Are you still wondering why they are dominant in the market?
You can check out The Secret Of Jeff Bezos’ Success, an interesting article about Jeff Bezos’s success story with Amazon.
Just like Amazon, try to gather as much information as you can about your target audience because it will make your work much easier.
There is another way to identify your audience. It’s through researching of your competitors. Let’s find out how.
Research your competitors to identify your target audience
The purpose of researching your competitors is not, exactly, to go after the same market but to help you better identify the audience and maybe find a niche market that they may have overlooked. Consider responding to the following questions:
- What are your competitors doing to retain their own audience?
- How are they targeting their audience?
- Who are your competitor’s current customers?
Understanding these will give you a clear idea of whom they are targeting and what kind of content they are posting to get the result they have. You can also use that as a benchmark for your content and marketing strategy.
A good way to get started is by searching for your competitor’s blog URL on Google and looking at their post titles, article titles, and article topics. You can also sign up with a tool like Ahrefs to get a better idea of what keywords your competitors are currently ranking for.
I repeat. The idea is not to copy your competitor’s works but to learn from them so you can better serve your customers.
When should you change your target audience?
Changing your target audience. Is that even advisable? Of course, yes but after serious consideration. Think about this. For many years, marketing has been through print media, radio, and television ads. That is a story we all know too well until different and newer technological tools started to crop up everywhere and everything was changed forever.
Say, you were in the advertising industry and you didn’t want to adapt to the new wave of information consumption – digital marketing, videos, Twitter, the Facebook of the world, and podcasting, just to name a few.
Well, your response from the market will be pretty severe – your business will be wiped out by the wave of change.
What I am telling you here is that your business can change its target audience when you know that your current one isn’t going to be profitable in the future. You are in business to make money through your service to the people. Never forget that.
However, when considering changing your target audience, you should plan for how this might affect your business model and your marketing strategy.
By changing your target audience, you are not only changing your customer base but also possibly changing your marketing strategy and business model. This is why it needs to be done with a clear understanding of what you are doing.
Your key takeaways 5 ways to identify your target audience
Understanding the needs and desires of your target audience is a fundamental aspect of a successful marketing campaign. Marketing is the process of finding the right product for your customer so that they can enjoy mutually beneficial relationships with you and your business.
Join AClasses Content Academy if you want to learn more about Content Creation Strategy and how to leverage content for your Business.
