How to Find Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is the most important marketing task your business has to complete. After all, how do you sell something in the best way possible if you don’t know who you’re selling it to? Knowing the ins and outs of your ideal customers—what they want, how they think and how to connect with them effectively—is the key to your business’ success. In this blog post, we’ll be sharing some insights into how to find your target audience. 

Target Audience Myths

Before we begin, we need to dispel a few myths. There are many ways to miss the mark on your target audience—sometimes to the extreme. Avoiding the following misconceptions will save you a lot of time and effort. 

First things first, your target audience is not ‘everyone’. This is an age-old trap. By placing your business in this make-believe position, you’ll dilute the appeal of your marketing. As the old adage goes: by trying to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. 

The same goes for gender demographics. The target audience of your product or service is unlikely to be all men or all women. These categories are just too broad. Instead of reaching for an impossible majority, you’ll want to focus your resources into a more defined group within the market. 

Oh, and finally, ‘people with money’, though amusing, isn’t a realistic target audience either. We need to dig a little deeper…

The Ideal Customer

The businesses that succeed are the ones that understand their ideal target market. Why? Because marketing becomes 10x easier when you know exactly who you’re communicating with. So, if we want to communicate effectively, we need to segment the market into different groups. Here are four ways to go about doing this: 

1. Demographic segmentation

Demographics will give you a basic idea of what type of audience you’ll be communicating with through your marketing. If you’re an established business, this shouldn’t be too difficult.

Are your customers typically older men? younger women? families? 

Perhaps your target audience is less gender or age-specific. It might be the case that your target audience has more to do with other demographics such as income, ethnic background, or industry profession. 

2. Geographic segmentation

Demographic and geographic segmentation go together like bread and butter. Once you’ve established your ideal customer demographics, it’s time to locate them. So, where are your ideal customers based? 

The answer to this question will depend on your industry. If you’re an e-commerce business, your customer base will be spread out nationally or even internationally. If you’re a service-based SME, however, your ideal customers will be local or regional. 

Geographic segmentation allows for two things: 1) It allows businesses to scale their growth regionally, which is the best strategy for long-term success. 2) Geographic segmentation allows businesses to tailor their marketing strategies to individual locations (e.g., localised McDonald’s meal menus, or Nike’s ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ campaign). 

3. Psychographic segmentation

If demographic and geographic segmentation prove unhelpful, don’t worry. It might be that the reason people buy what you sell has nothing to do with their age, gender or location. Instead, the reason why people use your business might have more to do with psychological traits. 

Psychological characteristics such as personality, lifestyle, opinions and attitudes inform why customers buy certain things. This can help marketers better understand why people purchase their products or services. 

For example, if you’re a sports-fitness business, you’re going to want to find people who keep an active lifestyle. Likewise, if you’re selling email organisation software, you’re going to want to find people who are conscientious and organised. 

4. Behavioural segmentation

It goes without saying that knowing how your target market behaves is vital information for business success. For example, do your ideal customers use Facebook and Instagram? Do they read their emails frequently? Do they frequently search for products and services on Google? 

Research into customer behaviour allows you to uncover where, when and how your ideal customer receives information. For one thing, it will prevent you from wasting money on marketing plans that are completely ineffective for reaching your target audience. 

Conclusion

The more you know about your target audience, the more successful your marketing strategy will become. If you can prove to your customers that you know who they are, what their problems are, what they love and what they hate, you’ll attract their attention almost effortlessly.

If you need us, we’re always around to help!

Universal Web Design

 If your business is looking to expand its online reach, our team can help you with that. Specialising in the full spectrum of digital marketing strategies—from SEO to social media management, blogs, emails, paid ads and more!—let Universal Web Design provide you with the marketing plan to unleash the target audience your business deserves. 

For more information, visit our website on www.universalwebdesign.co.uk, email us at sales@universalwebdesign.co.uk, or give us a call on 01206 588 000.