Understanding and defining your target audience is an important element in your overall marketing strategy. Getting to the root of how your target audience behaves, purchases, and receives content can lead to more successful sales and marketing campaigns.
A target audience is defined as a group of consumers characterized by behavior and specific demographics. Your target audience will influence decisions for your marketing strategy such as where to invest money, on what types of ads, and what type of paid or organic content will most appeal to your customers.
Target audiences are used to define the buyer persona(s) of a business, as well. A buyer persona is a fictional representation or character that represents the business’s ideal customer. By painting a picture of who this imaginary customer is, the business can outline what passions, desires, and demands this type of customer would have.
Some examples of demographics are:
Location
Age
Gender
Employment
Income
Ethnicity and Religion
By understanding each of these elements, you can further define how your customers make purchase decisions. For more specific and customized advertising or content campaigns, you can segment your audience into groups or define them further using categories.
Some categorical suggestions are:
Purchase Intention: Groups of people who are looking for a specific product and want to collect more information before doing so.
Interests: This data is what people like to see/do such as hobbies or tv shows. This data can help you connect to your target audience in a relatable way.
Subculture: This category is for people who identify with a shared experience such as specific music genres or entertainment genres.
Ready to define your target audience? Here are some steps to get started:
Analyze your existing customers: Understand the characteristics and purchasing patterns of the people who currently buy your products or services. Take a close look at the data and recall past successes. Try profiling your existing customer lists to collect some data about their demographics and behaviors.
Keep segmenting: Every audience demographic can be further segmented to be more examples. Be specific and know exactly who you are trying to target.
Watch your competition: Keep a close eye on your competition and see what’s working for them and what’s not. (This includes advertising, digital marketing, social media, content, and sales processes.) These tactics can help you further define your target audience and your marketing strategy.
Create audience personas: Documenting your ideal buyer persona is key to making your content ideas and campaigns match your target audience. There are a ton of persona builders online, but we suggest “Make My Persona” from HubSpot.
Find your audience: Once you have set and established your audience, you need to figure out where to find them and how they communicate. What platforms do they utilize? How do they shop for goods or services? What content do they appreciate and seek out? These elements are an important part of your content strategy plan.
Test ideas and don't be afraid of failing: If finding a target audience is new to you, you will have to test some campaigns and content first. Don’t be afraid to take some risks to test the waters! Some things don’t work, but that’s what testing is for. And then you can redirect and try again!
Reassess every year: Technology continues to evolve and so do people. As your business evolves with technology, consider new ways to connect with your target audience. Revisit their profiles and see if their interests have changed. Stay up to date with your customers and their buyers' journeys.
Knowing your target audience can make a significant difference in your marketing strategy and campaign implementation. If you plan to delve into a more robust marketing strategy and planning for 2022 and would like some guidance, please reach out to 30|90 Marketing for your marketing planning needs.
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