How to Find and Sell to Your Target Audience

An essential ingredient in becoming successful as a business is knowing how to find and sell to your target audience. Without this it becomes difficult to build your presence and overall growth as a company. This blog will go through the best ways to get to know your target audience.

Knowing and understanding your target audience has substantial benefits for a company of any size. It allows for more effective marketing strategies to be developed, therefore ensuring your marketing efforts are reaching the desired people. Not only that, but it helps create content that your target audience connects with.

There are a number of stages when getting to know your target audience, so keep reading to discover what they are and their purpose.

Identify Your Target Audience

The first stage is to identify who your ideal target audience is; this will come down to who your products/services are designed for. Depending on the size and nature of your company, you may find that you have a number of segments within your target audience.

For companies with bigger resources, segmented campaigns to reach a number of your target audiences can be constructed. However, for those with a smaller amount of resources, the key is to decide which segment would be most beneficial to target through marketing campaigns and focus on them.

Remember the customer and the consumer may not be the same person, as the customer is the person who buys the product/service but the consumer is the one who will utilise it. So think about who you are trying to target.

Researching Your Target Audience

Once you have identified your target audience, the next step will be to research them. The goals are to understand their characteristics and preferred methods of discovering brands.

If you are already an established company, reaching out to your current customers is a good place to start as they already have a connection to the company.

Conducting research online looking at prospective clients can also be highly beneficial as you are able to uncover more about their online habits and content they engage with.

Developing A Buyer Persona

Creating Buyer Personas is a great way to visualise your target audience and humanise them, they are also a handy tool to utilise. This is because buyer personas provide a focus and deeper level of understanding, so content is created with your target audience in mind rather than what you want to put out.

Key information to gather while creating a buyer persona.

Age/age range of your target audience
If there is a dominate gender
Education
Line of work/how much expendable money they have
Family situation
Hobbies & interests
Online activity habits
Other defining characteristics

There are templates online which are accessible to create a visual representation of your buyer persona. Xtensio is an example of a platform where you can create a buyer persona.

Implementation

With all this information to hand, you are able to start tailoring your marketing strategy from the ideal channels to use and what content will create the biggest impact on your target audience.

To get the most out of your marketing efforts.

Select the appropriate platforms to reach your target audience. It sounds simple, but focus your time on platforms where your target audience spends time.
Design campaigns around their interests, needs and wants.
Use the same terminology and language they would use so that written copy is relatable.
Create visuals that connect with the target audience.

This is a process that will be refined over time. We recommend periodically assessing your target audience to see if they have changed or adapted their consumer behaviour in any way. Also conducting A/B testing on different content types can help continuously develop your understanding of your target audience which is always a good thing!

I'd Love To Learn More!

If you would like to speak with our expert team regarding your social media needs, call us!