Identifying your target audience is a key component of your marketing strategy. By defining and narrowing your target audience or target market, you can effectively carve out a particular niche that you can dominate.
What is a target market?
First things first, it’s important to know what exactly a target market is. A target market is a specific group of people that you want to reach with your marketing message. Your target market is the most likely to buy your products or services. People who are not included in your target market can still buy from you. They’re just not the main focus of your marketing strategy. It’s important that your target market is based on actual research and consideration. This ensures that you’re targeting the right people.
How to define your target market
Compiling data on your current clients
Identifying who is already using your product or service is an important step in defining your target market. Having an understanding of the characteristics of your existing customer base allows you to focus on more people with those same interests. Google Analytics is a great tool for collecting demographic information about your customers. It allows you to obtain details such as age, gender, and location. Some key data points to take into consideration when you’re looking at this data include:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Employment
- Income
Location is an especially important component as this can help you in learning which geographic areas to target and the ideal times to schedule your social ads and posts.
Looking at social media analytics
Looking at social media analytics can help you get a sense of when people are most engaged with your social media channels. Since every social media platform is different, you’ll want to consider your analytics across all platforms. You may not want to average these out entirely but compile notable trends and peaks in your engagement on different platforms to tailor your approach better. Analytics are useful for telling you who is looking at your profile as well as what type of content is most effective for your business.
Using Facebook Insights
Similarly to Google Analytics, you can use Facebook Insights to gather key demographic information about your audience. While Facebook Insights has significantly reduced the amount of information available in recent years alongside iOS updates, you are still able to view general information about your audience’s age, gender and location.
Checking out the competition
Everyone has competitors, regardless of your product or target audience. Keeping an eye on your competitors can be a helpful way to improve your own marketing strategy. Pay attention to how they are positioning themselves, where they are advertising, and who they are addressing in their ads. This way, you can compare it with your marketing strategy and effectively differentiate yourself from others in the market. Remember that you want to carve out your own niche rather than simply following in the footsteps of another business.
Identify who your target audience isn’t
This step may appear redundant, but it’s important to determine who your customer isn’t. You don’t want to waste your time marketing to an audience that isn’t interested in your product or services. You can do this by looking at all the information you’ve collected and identifying the gaps in the audience that you don’t serve or aren’t interested in reaching.
Delving deeper into your audience
Target market segmentation involves dividing your target market into smaller groups. This allows you to create a relevant marketing message for each group. There are a few key ways you can look to segment and differentiate your audience.
Purchase intention
This group of people are looking for a particular product and want to gather more information before doing so. Having this data helps you better direct your messaging to your audience.
Interests
Everyone has different hobbies, and knowing what people are into can be very helpful in crafting your marketing strategy. People’s interests can reveal a lot about buyer motivation and behaviours.
Subculture
The term ‘subculture’ refers to a group of people that identify with a shared experience. There are many different types of subcultures, such as specific music scenes and entertainment genres. Subcultures can help you better understand your audience and allows you to consider ways in which you can market to these subcultures.
Creating your target audience profile
Once you’ve collected the data and have a good idea of who your customers are, it’s time to put it all together in a target audience profile. You’ll want to include all the key information, such as location, age, gender, industry, and so on. You should also include information specific to your brand.
Need help navigating how to market to your target audience? We’ll be touching on how to market toward these newfound audiences of yours on our next week article!
