The truth for most businesses is that to be successful; you need to have a legion of loyal customers that can also bring in new customers. But, to build this group of customers, you’ve got to target them in every phase of your marketing strategy.
This raises the question of how to determine your target audience? We’ve taken the time to create a brief guide that will help you define your audience and use your ideal customer persona to build a digital marketing strategy that works.
Here’s how you can identify your target audience.
Ways to Breakdown Your Target Audiences
Before we get into identifying the target audience, it’s best to understand the different ways to break down your ideal target audience. The first way to break your target audience up is my interest.
You can separate consumers based on their interests or hobbies and specific entertainment preferences. By doing this, you can select messages that fit within your marketing plan while allowing you to connect with your audience.
Another way to separate your audience is based on subcultures. Subcultures are the experiences that people share with others. In other words, you’re gaining a deeper understanding of what motivates customers buying decisions.
The last way to separate your ideal target audience is based on why they’re buying a product. You group consumers based on the products they’re looking for.
By doing this, you can center on the problem that customers have and ensure your marketing messaging provides them with the solution to this issue. The ways to define your target audience can be used to determine your audience further.
Here’s what to do before launching your targeting campaign.
Survey Current Customers
The first step in defining or redefining your target audience is to perform an analysis of your current customers. These people have a current or reoccurring need for the products and services your brand creates.
As you review your current customer base, there are several factors you need to consider. What area do your customers live in? What are the specific preferences of these reoccurring customers?
It’s not always easy to gather this data. Still, you can do so by prompting customers to fill out surveys or taking some time to engage with them using the various social media platforms you use to market your business.
You can also use your content as a way of engaging with customers. However, if this is the route you choose to take, ensure you check out this tool which will help you generate compelling blog titles to get people to click on the blog and continue reading it.
Perform In-Depth Market Research
There will never be a time when you should ignore the opportunity to perform a market research analysis. Take the time to review the research in your industry and note the current and future trends that will become prominent.
It’s essential to review the trends in your industry and determine if they can be used for your specific brand and how to focus your marketing efforts to align with your market research findings. After you perform a market research analysis, think of ways to use it while highlighting the unique qualities of your products and services.
Don’t forget to observe the things that your competitors are doing. This allows you to maintain your competitive advantage or adjust your marketing strategy to improve your industry standings.
Develop Brand Personas
Audience personas are the best way to define your target audience further. It’s helpful if you’ve got products that can be useful to several people.
You can ensure that the messaging you use works for each separate persona you have created for your brand.
This is useful if you’re in the phase of expanding your business and need to develop sub-segments of your target audience.
While creating your ideal customer persona, you might find it essential to think about who doesn’t qualify as your target audience. You need to do this because there are going to be customers that resemble your audience but aren’t quite the people you need to advertise to.
Ensure you include who your audience isn’t in your marketing plan. This will ensure you don’t waste marketing funds targeting the wrong audience.
Review & Redefine
Data analytics are an important part of the digital marketing strategy. The analytics will help determine if the strategy you’re using is working and how it’s working.
Make a note of the things that are working so that you can utilize them in future marketing strategy campaigns. If the data shows that aspects of your strategy aren’t working, it’s time to redefine and revise the plan.
As you continue in business, you’ll find that your plan will need to be redefined to meet the goals and needs of your business in that current stage. For example, if you’re looking to expand your company, you’ll need to redefine the target audience to meet the goal of obtaining a larger target audience.
How to Determine Your Target Audience: Appealing to the Right Customer
This guide answers how to determine your target audience and the different ways you can break down the audience to meet company marketing goals. You should always use the data to refine your target audience over time.
And don’t be afraid to check out what your competitors are doing. It’s encouraged. There is tons of information we have to offer you, so you need to check out some of the other posts in this section.
