Identifying Your Target Audience In 10 Simple Yet Effective Ways

Identifying the target audience and target market is the most crucial element for any marketer to consider. But it is astonishing, how many businessperson still negate the significance of understanding their target audience. Well, it may be like, the marketing head or the chief sales head must be knowing about their target audience. But the moment the sales executives or the other subordinate sales employees are asked who their target audience is, they don’t seem to have any clue.

Without having a clear understanding of the target audience, a business or a brand cannot sustain for long. If you are not familiar with the psychology of your target audience, those are mere semantics. In this competitive market, being a businessperson or a brand owner, you must figure out what problems your target audience face? What could be the possible solution to it? Which age group and gender comprises most of your target group? What do they love, hate or fear? Knowing all these aspects will help you to stand a better chance to enjoy a thriving business. Also, it helps them quite a lot to reach out to the marketing influencers. And who can deny, that you can also identify who would be your long-term customer, and who would stay limited to being ‘one-time buyer.’

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So, whether you sell a product or a service, whether you have a clothing line, or real estate business, know your target audience well, to maximize your sales. And this understanding and identifying processes are usually done during the initial planning phase. So how do you do that? How do you define your target audience? Here are ten simple ways on how to find your target audience online.

1. Understand the Pain Points of your Audience
This is the starting point actually. Try to figure out what are the pain points of your target audience, and what measures must you take to solve those problems. Your main motto should be to solve the problems your target audience face and offer them a power-packed solution. And you must include this quality in your sales pitch and other marketing communications. Nothing sell better like pain and fear. So play on these two things, what pains your target audience, what challenges do they face everyday, and what do they fear the most that stunt their well-being.

2. Define the Demographic
Knowing the target audience demographics, what are they mostly comprised of, is another essential thing that you must consider. And this understanding must be entirely based on factual data, and not random guesses and assumptions. You must carry out a thorough research about their age, gender, educational qualities, geographic locations, and their social status.

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This would help you to create a robust customer profile that you can refer to later, and which will help you in the long run.

3. A Customer Persona/Profile is Essential
Just as I mentioned above, once you understand the pain points of your target audience, and get all the data about the demographic, start creating a strong customer profile for each of your prospects. This customer profile or a customer persona is the representation of the average member of your target audience and will exhibit the common traits of your target audience.

And to create this, you must not only consider, age, sex, education and social status, but also their temperament, emotional quotients, and sensitivity.

4. Create a Clear picture of the Customer
Once you start solving the problems and challenges your target audience face, keep a provision to determine a clear picture of each of your prospects. Pass this on to your sales team and ask them to focus on these pictures. Group each of your clients as per their net worth, lifestyle, if they are married or still single, what are their personal interests, sports or food? Cricket or Baseball? Traveling or enjoying homely life? Are they retailers, or manufacturers, male or female, etc, etc.

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Define each picture with utmost details and relevance. Only then you will achieve the success of knowing your target audience entirely, and accordingly, create your marketing strategies.

5. Prioritize your Resources
While grouping and understanding your audience, simultaneously also strive to focus on that segment which is most likely to buy your product or service. Which group has the supreme potential to be long-term customers and could even attain the stature of being brand advocates of your business. Once you identify the particular group or segment, prioritize your resources accordingly. Setting your marketing priorities correct will yield higher ROI, compared to that of a random marketing plan with no such prioritization or cognition.

6. Learn from your Competitors
In one of my past Blog posts, I have strongly advocated the importance of looking to your competitors to learn the game of strategies.

competitors-analysis
It is indeed imperative to keep a close check on your competitors and see what they are doing, what measures they are deploying to define their target audience. They must have done extensive market research and then only are working in that direction. In case there is a similarity between your target audience and that of your competitors’, then observe and learn the way of their addressal to their customers.

I am not encouraging any sort of plagiarism, but there’s no harm to follow others and be in their shoes.

7.Understand where does your own Forte lie
Of course, you would be knowing better, in which area your company’s forte lies. Focus particularly on that area. If your expertise involves digital marketing, concentrate on capturing that niche. If your expertise is telecom, focus on the same. So you see, focusing on a specific niche of you own, helps you get to know your target audience much better.

8. Give them exactly what they like
Gone are the days when people liked being ‘sold’ to. Today, if you want to thrive in the market, you must not make it obvious that you want to sell something to a prospect. Instead, focus on a problem, and state how your product or service can solve that problem.

And how can you state your prowess in solving those problems? Create informative, friendly and creative contents dedicated to your target audience. It could be infographics, could be Animated Videos, corporate PPT Presentations, Video Infographics, Social Media Graphics, Blog posts, or any other medium that you deem best.

However, before pushing out those contents to your target audience, you must find out which content clicks well with which particular segment of your target audience group. The one that resonates with them must be pitched to that particular group.

If your target audience is more into quirky social media visual contents, create more of that. If they are more willing to read case studies, or white papers, give them those. And if your target audience is more of a visual lover, then send them engaging Infographics and Animated Videos. It’s your call at the end of the day!

9. How to find target audience on social media

Take help of the social listening tools and track your target audience’s social media activity. Keep a close check on Twitter, and see what trending hashtags they are following. What kinds of posts do your business target audience like, and what nature of posts do they share. This will give you a general idea of their likes and dislikes, what kinds of content do they prefer, what are the nature of posts that allure them. This insight will also help you to achieve point number 8.

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10.Speak their language.
You must never take it for granted that whatever technical terminologies and jargons you use within your industry, your target audience will understand the same. A big no!

It is not possible for them to understand what are the typical jargons related to graphic design, or to digital marketing, or to IT industry or Internet of Things. Speak in their lingo, simplify the terminologies in a common tongue, so that your target audience can fathom those easily. Keep your tone normal, and don’t be erudite. Think about the receiver of your message, if they fail to decipher what your message mean, your ROI will take a nosedive for sure.

Only when your speak their language, will they shift their attention towards you. You must strive to remove any hurdle that might hamper their understanding of your business.

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So you see, gathering knowledge and insight about your target audience is no rocket-science. It just takes some quality time and effort, and correct steps to sharpen up your customer targeting strategies. And without that knowledge, every strategy you come up with, every single venture you undertake, and every sales pitch you send will get aborted midway. You must make your conception clear about the target audience whom you are approaching. Only then would you smell long-term success.

So did we miss any step? What measures do you take to understand your target audience? Or were you still creating marketing strategies based on mere assumptions? Write back to us anything you want to share. We are all eyes and ears.  🙂

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