What is a Target Audience?
Target audience is a group of consumers who are most likely to purchase your products or services. Finding a right target audience is discovering what kind of people are most likely to be interested in your services or products. They are likely united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviors.
Why should we identify a target audience?
- To build a stronger connection : The more you find out about your audience, the stronger connection you can build based on their needs and interests.
- Enable market segmentation: Specific segmentation allows you to tailor your messages and strategies to the target audience, which leads to the effective use of marketing budget. Identifying social media audience helps you to find your niche market that you can dominate.
You can start with broad categories like millennial generation or female mothers in 20s then narrow down. But you need to target specifically in the end, as there’s no “one-size-fits-all” strategy.
How we can identify the ideal target audience?
- Collect demographic data on your target audience
You can start with current customers. You can leverage Google Analytics or Facebook Insights, you can get traffic data and audience analysis. Those tool provide access to demographic and behavioral data, enabling you to learn more about your audience and build ideal personas for marketing strategies.
First, Google Analytics provides information through Audience report about users who visit your website. Largely, 1) information on visitors (potential customers) such as demographics and regions, 2) whether these potential customers are new/revisited and their frequency of visits, 3) access devices such as mobile and desktop, user browser, operating system, etc. For this, you should Install the Google Analytics tracking code on your website, so you can obtain real data about your website visitors.
Or you can collect your audience behavioral data from audience insights or customized advertising on Facebook. Facebook pixel allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. To learn more, you can find more information here(Hootsuite blog).
2. Monitor your competitors and their audience
Or if you have direct competitors, it is possible to look for the target audience among their subscribers on social networks. Or if you want to differentiate your brand from competitors, you can draw a positioning map to find the sweet spot or a niche in the market that you can fit in.
For getting more audience traffic and data, it’s better to optimize your website or social media content with SEO or marketing tactics. Boost your SEO drive for the best keywords of your business and see how those keywords are working. The people who search for your keywords or anything near to your keywords will be your target audience. Then, pick one or two visitors to your website and intensely research on them to create your persona.
How can I reach a target customer?
Step 1. Make sure that you have a focused target audience with right criteria
To find the most relevant audience, you should consider what criteria to use. The goal is to remove the groups of people who are not relevant to the company’s products or services. Audiences can be sorted by any number of ways based on the combination of criteria. With the right people out of the mix, you can approach your customers with more customized and valid marketing messages.
Then, what data should I consider as criteria? Some data points you might want to compile are demographic and psychographic data such as: Age, Gender, Education background, Social class, Location, Profession, Consumption habits, Purchasing power, Likes, Values
All demographic and behavioral data you can compile could be a good foundation source to set your ideal audience. Remember, the sharper the potential customer’s profile is, the more opportunities we have to personalize the messages.
Step 2. Identify what your target audience want most from you.
According to the 2013 online personal experience study, 74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when its content, offers, or ads have nothing to do with their interests.
This is why you should create marketing strategies and messages that fully address audience’s wants or needs. Today, we are talking about the rise of personalized campaign approach, mainly driven by ad tech. Marketers need to send out messages that appeal exactly to them to win their attention.
Step 3. Choose the best channel to communicate
What’s the best way to reach your target audience? You can start by thinking or surveying how your target audience gets information. You can consider traditional media such as TV, newspapers and radio, or digital media such as websites, organic search, social media or podcast.
Step 4. Measure campaign result to determine if you actually did reach the right audience
Monitor the campaign result, and analyze the real audience data that came into your websites, apps or made a purchase. If the audience you predicted is different from the actual data, then you can tweak strategies for future campaigns to make them more effective.
The benefits of personalized marketing is diverse: improved response rate, increased sales, stronger brand perceptions, increased product trial rates, increased repeat purchase rate and the list goes on. Or in other words, cost goes down and conversion goes up. For this, you should start with slice and dice the data into meaningful insights, and keep shaping the perfect target audiences by making a deep dive into analysis.
Ideas for Social Impact 