When you imagine your target audience, what do you see? If you imagine a person who is just like yourself, you’re most likely wrong. It takes careful consideration and research to determine just the right demographic that’s most likely to become your customers. Here are some tips on how to choose your target market.
How to Find Your Target Audience Online
You never want to waste your marketing efforts trying to sell your product or service to EVERYONE. You want to hone in on the people who are most likely to engage with your brand and become a customer. Those people are your target audience.
When you’re trying to define who is in your target audience, there are many ways to do this. One of the clearest indicators of your target audience is, of course, your current or previous customers. You can learn a lot from the people who have already decided to purchase your product or service.
Use analysis tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to find out the demographic that’s already a fan of yours.
In addition to using these analytics tools, you can also directly ask your customers. Send out a link to a survey on social media and ask your followers to answer questions about why they followed you and what they want from your brand. You can also send this survey to your email subscribers.
And then, of course, there’s in-person conversation. Gasp! Just meet your customers in person and talk to them. Connecting through conversation is still a genuine way to learn about their likes, motivations, and struggles.
Once you’ve done the research, you can create your buyer personas.
Building buyer personas
A buyer persona is a profile of your target audience. You sit down to imagine the person who will likely buy your product. However, creating this profile is not fictional—it should be based on facts. (You know, from that research you just compiled?)
Buyer personas are meant to help you develop empathy for your audience. You’ll start to understand their motivations, fears, desires. Try to answer questions like: What do they need? What questions do they want answered? What problem do they need solved? How can my product or service help them?
It’s crucial to understand that a buyer persona should go beyond just age, gender, and ethnicity. Try to fill in this profile that will describe an ideal person in your target audience:
- What is this person’s job?
- What type of neighborhood/ home do they live in?
- Describe their relationship status and family life.
- How does this person dress?
- What does this person do for fun?
- What is this person’s favorite food? Favorite type of music?
- What does this person watch on TV?
- Does this person have a good sense of humor?
- What are their goals?
All about Educating the Business Owner
At Post Launch, one of our values is education. We strive to learn the latest and greatest information about digital marketing, and we also make it a goal to empower our clients to learn this stuff, too. We’ve got tons of web presence marketing tips for you, and they’re one click away.
