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How to Find the Right Target Audience for Your Business

Marketing is one of the most valuable tools you can use to grow your business, and knowing your target audience will make your advertising efforts much more effective.

What Is a Target Audience and Why is It Important?

The very first step to understanding who your target audience is is to understand its definition. The target audience of your business is the group of consumers that are going to be the most likely to want to make a purchase from you. Depending on the kinds of goods or services your company offers, you could have one specific target audience or several. Target audiences are grouped by certain demographic traits, which include:

  • Gender
  • Location
  • Educational background
  • Age
  • Socioeconomic status
  • And more

Target audience is a very important aspect to any business’s marketing strategy. When you spend money on a marketing campaign, you usually don’t want to target every possible demographic with your ads. Without identifying a target audience, you could waste a lot of time, money, and resources advertising to groups of people who are never going to purchase your product or service. Instead, you identify what groups of people are most likely to be a consumer of your business, and then you only market to them.

 

Identifying your target audience can also dictate where and how you advertise. For example, if your target audience is young people, you are probably going to focus your marketing efforts on social media sites that are popular among young people, like Instagram, and not on Facebook or in the newspaper.

 

Knowing your target audience will also allow you to market to them in a way that builds relationships. Consumers like to feel like brands are more than just money-making companies, and around 80 percent of consumers report that they are more likely to make purchases from companies that have personalized interactions.

 

Here are some simple tips for finding your target audience and improving your marketing strategies.

 

Understand Purchase Path and Pain Points

When you are coming up with your target audience, its good to understand what path consumers follow before they make a purchase and the pain points that attract them to a product or service in the first place. One way to understand this is to ask yourself these questions:

  • How can my business be the solution to this problem?
  • What goal will my target audience want to reach?

These simple questions will help you get into the mindset of your customers and identify different potential customer types. It can be helpful to create personas or functional characters based on your research who could be customers. By doing this, you will gain a better understanding of their pain points.

 

For example, if you are a criminal appeals lawyer, the pain point of most of your clients probably isn’t going to have much to do with divorce or child custody, so these are not your pain points. However, a pain point for your services could be moving on with their lives or getting the freedom they deserve.

Use Your Existing Customers

The best research you can collect will come from your existing customers. Take a look at what kinds of people are buying your product, inquiring about your services, and visiting your website. Using tools like google analytics, Hotjar, Hubspot, and Facebook Insights will give you more information about what demographics your users belong to. If your company has Instagram or other social media websites, there are analytic tools that go with these that can be useful too.

 

The more you understand about who is already buying your products and visiting your website, the better equipped you will be to determine who your target audience is. As your company grows, you’ll continue to learn more about who is buying your products and how you should adjust your marketing strategy.

 

Roni Davis is a writer, blogger, and legal assistant operating out of the greater Philadelphia area

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