What Is a Target Audience?
The people who are most likely to use your products or services are the target audience; this is the group that should be given priority when aiming your advertising campaigns.
People who fit the description of being out of shape men in the age range of 30 to 50 are the main focus of this consumer group.
It is critical to identify your target market so you know where to concentrate your sales and advertising initiatives. This aids you in knowing the person you are trying to serve and what matters to them. This can include:
- Where do they hang out on and offline?
- How do they like to communicate?
- What is their demographic information (ex: age range, expertise, location, job title, hobbies, etc.)
- What are their psychographic information (i.e., behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, etc.)
- What pain points your product or service solves?
For example, if you have a SaaS product that helps IT professionals manage file-sharing across mobile devices, your target audience might look something like this:
- IT Directors with 10+ years of experience working in IT at enterprise firms
- $100k+ salary
- Most likely men who are married with 2+ kids
- Spends downtime on Reddit and Twitter
- The biggest pain point – how manual and time-intensive the current file-sharing processes are
It’s essential to remember that the people for whom you are attempting to market can be either particular or general, reliant on what item you are selling. An example of this would be vendors offering standard jackets, whose customer base is more expansive as the garments are worn by males, females, and kids.
Alternatively, if the firm is selling goose (warmth-producing type) coats, it can restrict its prospective buyers to people from the coldest regions of the Earth and those working in extreme environments outside.
No matter what, determining who your intended audience is essential for basically any step of your marketing program.
The outcome of our current survey indicated that the participants had benefited most from conducting target audience research with regards to content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
The Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience
It is a frequent notion among marketers that one cannot appeal to everyone with every product or service, and while some degree of exceptions are possible, this is generally accurate.
For example, what would be the best way to market a basketball to a man in his fifties who has never attempted a three-point shot?
Why would you take the effort if you even could?
The most effective marketers understand that the aim is not to convince everyone to buy their product; it is crucial to concentrate on those individuals who already have some requirement for it. These are the individuals that you should classify as the ones you want to target.
It is essential to define and grasp your intended audience, and this should serve as the fundamental basis of any marketing plan or method you choose to implement from then on.
For instance, it may seem like a sensible plan to broadcast a commercial during the Super Bowl given the large viewership.
Considering the expense of the commercial and only a quarter of the audience interested in your product, it’s not a very wise expenditure, would you agree?
If your product is something like a stylish sweater, you should advertise it in a clothing magazine. This is the best way to reach potential customers and maximize your returns on investment.
Other than attaining greater success rate and raising Return of Investment, grasping your intended audience can aid you in developing a more strong relationship with them and gaining their trust.
You can create ads that are written in the same vernacular as your target audience and address them straight away.
It is crucially important nowadays to personalize customer interactions, with the majority of customers (80%) showing that they have a far greater tendency to make a purchase from a brand that provides them with a customized experience.
Target Audience Types
Have you ever seen the TV show “Criminal Minds” in which FBI agents pursue criminals with their distinctive profiling techniques?
Profiling centers around ascertaining the attitudes and behavior of the murderers, based on the offenses they have perpetrated.
It could be argued that constructing a target demographic or an optimal consumer persona is an artistic endeavor. Just, you know, instead of murders, you’re profiling customers.
We need to recognize the different types of people we are attempting to reach before we can complete this task.
Here are the most popular group categorizations that the biggest companies use in their profiling processes:
Purchase Intent
This group includes people who are seeking out a particular item and wish to acquire additional knowledge prior to buying it.
It could be any item or object, ranging from a car to a pair of shoes, a laptop to a television, and even a set of frying pans.
Groups of potential buyers that already have an intent to buy are ideal to target as all you have to do is convince them to buy from you instead of anyone else.
Interest
This data can be used to discover what people like, their pastimes, and what kind of entertainment they enjoy.
Once you have familiarized yourself with the things which spark the interest of those you are trying to reach, it shall be easier for you to find common ground with them.
People who love to play tennis will be more likely to buy items necessary for the sport (like racquets, bags, and shoes) when the good weather arrives and the tennis courts they usually use are open to the public again.
No matter the needs of your customers, if you know what they are you can tailor your promotional activities to them and make sure your business is presented as an attractive choice.
Subculture
Groups of individuals who share similar opinions, likes and backgrounds form subcultures.
For example, city dwellers may favor ready-made meals or going out to eat because they often don’t have the time to cook.
Prior to engaging with a subset of a culture, you must determine how it corresponds with what you’re offering/promoting.
For example, True Crime podcasts target their particular niches, those who are enticed by a certain kind of material.
Let’s review eight techniques for dividing your social media followers.
1. Understand your audience.
Realizing who your intended interest group is vital to apportioning social media accurately and suitably. Without having an understanding of who your customers are, their preferences, and how they like to be marketed to, it will be hard to come up with additional ways to assist you to be successful in your endeavor.
In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your target audience, you can construct representation models of your ideal customer based on the information and analytics you have gathered. Buyer personas are hypothetical characters that are designed to represent the ideal customers for your business. They enable you to concentrate on leads that have potential to become customers, draw in customers that offer most value, and craft communications that appeal to their particular needs and wants.
One way of looking at it is that if your data suggests that Facebook gets the most interaction from users, you should put in more effort to research the people who use the platform and build a buyer persona to get a better understanding of them. This ties in greatly to our following advice, as a number of social media sites come with capabilities that allow you to target your different groups of people specifically with your marketing messages.
2. Use native social media targeting tools.
When many people imagine segmenting through social media, they think about the various paid targeting options available. Regardless of the level of a budget, organic targeting alternatives are available on numerous platforms that can be used to communicate with specific audiences.
For instance, Facebook enables enterprises to direct their communiqués towards consumers depending on demographics, interests, and locale (like the case illustrated below).
3. Create audience groups.
Social media is all about community. Creating a group of people with similar interests is a simple way to split up your audience and gain useful information. You can either make the group open, where anyone can join, or closed, where a moderators needs to approve new members. Both have their advantages.
Groups which are open to the public make it possible for you to garner data about how the general population perceives your brand. This forum can be used to converse and to ask queries that require an expansive response, like “What difficulties do you face most often?” or “What is the definition of great customer service?” Additionally, you can attempt novel plans with the audience or learn more content subjects that they think is helpful and pertinent. The upside to this is that you’ll have plenty of people to brainstorm with. The disadvantage? They may not have the expertise in your field that you require.
That’s where closed groups can come in handy. You are granting permission for each individual to join the group, and you can choose the most suitable applicants. It could be a collection of individuals whose ideas are important to you, or a list of attendees of a gathering you have staged. No matter what the entrance requirements are, asking people you trust for specialized, advantageous feedback can be extremely beneficial. Although, it may not garner as many reactions as a public dialogue.
Different social networking websites have the ability to host groups, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn. On Facebook, it is possible to set up a group related to your business and relevant to what your target audience is into. This group can be open to the public or only visible to certain people, as stated previously. The same goes for LinkedIn, though it is only recommended to employ it if the people you’re attempting to reach are predominantly adults in the professional field.
4. Create audience lists.
A lot of marketers are aware of making lists – we do that any time we launch a fresh email drive. Did you know that you can utilize lists to become more efficient in the conversations you have over social media? Users of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter have the ability to make lists of contacts, supporters, those that attended a function, and more.
On Twitter, you can divide your followers into distinct classes by means of making lists, such as their position in the buying process. Whenever these people from your list share their tweeting, you will have visibility inside a special channel in order to figure out the topics they usually post about and the subjects that make them happy. Once you have this knowledge, you can devise ads that address the specific desires of your divided audience more precisely.
5. Post at different times of the day.
From a marketing perspective, we realize how crucial timing is in relation to marketing efforts — particularly when it comes to social media. If you have created buyer personas which are correct and pertinent, you may grasp that your supporters are spread out over different parts of the globe. This implies that your followers in the middle part of the United States are sleeping while those in Australia are beginning to awake.
Varying up the time of when you publish your content can help you reach a wider range of followers by enabling users from different time zones to interact with your updates.
A further advantage to completing this task is that you will be able to get your intended viewers to observe multiple postings. You can view it this way: if you make three posts during the day that target different groups, the people in all three groups can view the messages meant for the others. There are three more chances for them to engage with your material and three extra chances to bring in conversions.
6. Leverage multiple networks.
Once you have a better understanding of how to distinguish between your specific target market, there will be an increased number of individuals eager to interact with you on social media. If you don’t already have multiple social media profiles, you could recognize that one of the most accurate methods of delivering the correct material to particular groups is to make multiple social media accounts, each with a particular purpose.
7. Streamline your processes.
If you opt to make use of multiple websites or wish to simplify your procedures, there are many social media tools that can assist you in constructing and releasing advertisements tailored for the audiences you have segmented.
Falcon.io is one of those tools. This social platform provides everything you need for paid and organic campaigns, like tracking customer interaction data and creating tailored and counterpart audiences for further categorization, as evidenced in the picture below.
