Roughly $37 billion is wasted yearly just from ad budgets that fail to interact with the Target Audience.
Marketers must create targeted and personalized experiences for customers to capture their attention amid a sea of brands. However, if they want to succeed, marketers must have a comprehensive understanding of the ideal customer and make informed decisions about media, creative, and timing.
With a myriad of choices between paid search advertising (PPC) platforms like Google Ads, display networks like Facebook, and other social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, it can be overwhelming for a marketer to know how and where to get started with or increase their ad spend.
The rule of thumb is this: don’t bite off more than you can chew. When running marketing campaigns, it’s vital to ensure your efforts are strategic and sustained over a while, not just a flash in the pan that fizzles out after one week or one month.
Before starting any campaign, take the time to plan it out and set achievable goals for yourself along the way. There’re many different strategies you can employ, but they’ll all require rigorous planning before implementation if you’re going to be successful! But the very first thing you need to know for becoming successful is your exact Target Audience.
Define Your Target Audience
A target audience is a specific segment of people within a larger population who share similar characteristics or behaviors, making them more receptive to marketing messages about particular products or services. Of course, the goal of any advertising campaign is to get your message out there, but it’s essential not to waste your money on advertising to people that don’t fit into your target audience.
Target audiences are based on a specific group of people, e.g., males, females, teenagers, or children. In general, they share the same interests. Target audiences also often share similar lifestyles. To reach the target audience effectively, advertisers can benefit from using the mass marketing communication strategy. Advertising messages are personalized and relevant to each target audience member.
7 Ways to Find Your Target Audience
To find your target audience, you should take time to analyze the data from consumer engagements, review current buyers and purchase trends and optimize continuously as new information becomes available.
You can enhance your campaign effectiveness by eliminating the non-target audience and focusing on reaching more desirable customers.
Use these tips to determine a target audience profile:
1. Analyze Your Existing Customer Data and Reach Out to them with Specific Questions
Compiling customer information is most accessible for anyone at any stage in their business, but the more you know about your customers, the better. The best way to learn this is through engaging on social media or distributing customer surveys.
Get a better idea of their interests and ask them questions about how they found your business or product and any other information that will put you in touch with the same base of customers again. Then, you can use insights from this data to find your target audience for future marketing initiatives.
2. Research Your Market and Identify The Present Trends
Before you set out to find your target audience, you should research the market and identify any trends. Then, if your goal is to be successful online, identify consumer needs, wants, and expectations from your products or services.
Track their behavior by monitoring social media platforms for comments and conversations about competitors and specific brands relevant to your business. You can also see what blogs they read regularly or what websites they visit frequently. You will need this information as a launching pad for understanding who they are and how you can target them in the future using one of the many digital marketing strategies available today.
3. Your Competitors are the Best Source of Info
The last place you want to look for information about your target audience is online, with your competitors and their customers. A simple Google search will often tell you everything that’s already out there on the world wide web.
Instead, talk to other companies that offer similar products or services related to yours. They’ll likely know what consumers are looking for and what they’re willing to spend money on at any given moment in time. As long as it’s rel the same industry as your business or a close one, their info could help find new customers who also like using your company.
4. Focus on Your Niche Audience
If you don’t have much experience marketing an online product or service, it pays to within your niche most of the time. For example, if you’re a plumber and want to build your business using social media marketing strategies, it would be more effective to focus your efforts on plumbing companies instead of local companies in general.
The more extensive and more diverse the pool of customers you need to reach out to, the harder it will be for you to engage them or eventually convert them into actual sales easily.
5 . Use Analytics Tools to Find an Ideal Target Audience
You can also get valuable information from Google Analytics or other website statistics packages to help you identify which shoppers convert into buyers to find the people most likely to buy products like yours. Simply analyzing who comes through your doors, where they come from, and how they will give you the information you need to reach out to them again with a relevant marketing campaign.
6. Go Counter-clockwise by Defining Who Your Target Audience Isn’t
When defining your audience in terms of demographic data, think about the opposite side of the coin. Start by thinking about who your target audience isn’t; identify a profile that fits what you want to achieve in the future.
For example, many small businesses tend to focus their efforts on Facebook because it seems like everyone’s on there these days. However, it would be more efficient to focus your social media spending efforts on Twitter or Instagram because they’re better platforms for reaching out to millennials.
7. Continuously Revise
It is an ever-changing digital landscape where companies are forced to constantly reevaluate and adapt their strategies to stay ahead of the competition. If you’re serious about increasing your sales, then you should be ready to evolve and change as often as necessary. Unfortunately, many businesses look great on paper but fail in the real world because they are unwilling to adapt their strategies when circumstances require them to do so.
The Best Approach to Reach Your Target Audience
Now that you have found your ideal target audience, it’s time to use the strategies and tools to reach them.
1. Learn Everything About Your Target Audience
Now that you know more about your target audience, it’s time to learn everything there is to know about them to create a solid marketing plan. It should include online habits and hangouts (which social networks or websites do they visit most frequently?), geographical and failing location, what they do for work, and their income level? The more info you have on your target audience, the better results you’re likely to achieve with your marketing efforts.
2. Make Sure Your Product or Service is What They Want Before Execution
Many businesses fail to take the necessary steps before jumping into an expensive digital marketing strategy like email newsletters or pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Whether you have developed a physical product or service, it pays to visit your target audience and see what people think about it.
3. Be Very Thorough With Your Product Description
Don’t cut any corners with defining your product or service in the best possible way. You have to be clear about what it does, who will use it, and why people buy it. Make sure you include examples of how your product can benefit a customer even before spending their money.
4. Build A Community Around Your Product or Service
No matter what you’re selling, a certain level of passion and enthusiasm comes with these products. If you can tap into that passion, it will be reflected in your product’s sales conversion rate. Try hosting events where people can learn more about your product or service first-hand, such as seminars, training, workshops, etc. This strategy has proven to work very well for many online businesses.
5. Target Influencers First To Spread The Word To The Masses
One huge mistake many marketers make is focusing all their attention on the masses instead of the influencers. While within their niche, audience and failing to reach out to industry experts who can provide valuable recommendations and insights from time to may lead to a lukewarm response from your target audience.
6. Address Potential Pain Points And Potential Objections
Once you have identified what your target audience wants to hear, it’s time to address any issues or objections about using your product or service. Consider sending an email newsletter outlining the steps necessary for someone to succeed with your product or service (with a discount, of course).
7. Host A Webinar To Grab Attention
As you know what to do, one of the best ways is to host a webinar. Although this strategy takes more preparation and effort than simply sending an email newsletter or creating content on your site, people often find it very effective because they tend to produce higher conversion rates overall.
8. Create Social Media Ads To Attract/Warm-Up New People
Once you have determined the demographics of your target audience, create social media ads to reach people in that info. Ads should direct viewers to an outcome such as buying something or simply liking your page. Don’t forget to address the problems with your creatives.
9. Give Away Valuable Content for FREE
One of the best ways to build a following and position yourself as an expert is by giving free content. Although this strategy may not work for everyone, it could be worth trying if you still need to establish your credibility within your industry.
10. Target Local Audiences For Better Results
Many businesses fail because they never considered targeting their local customers. If you have a physical location, be sure to create a Google My Business page where potential customers can easily find your business information.
11. Be Generous As You Expect Others To Be
Here’s one strategy that many people have used for decades. If you want to attract more business opportunities, express your willingness to help others solve their problems first. This strategy can lead to a higher chance of experiencing reciprocity, which means more referrals.
12. Adjust, Repeat and Grow
After your strategy is complete, you will need to go back and revise it based on the insights you have found on the revised plan. Just make sure that the adjustments are based on actual results so that you don’t lose focus as time goes on.
Conclusion
Identifying the right Target Audience and reaching them in a way that converts are two critical factors for business success. In addition, if you treat your marketing like an ever-evolving science, you’re more likely to achieve results than if you stayed with the same old strategies.
People often struggle to identify a target audience for their business, whether content marketing or physical sales. This could be because they don’t know how to segment and prioritize their market research.
If you are one of those people who have trouble choosing a specific target audience, we can help.
About PERC
At PERC, we help our clients identify who their target audience is. We then strategize ways to approach them and get them interested in what you sell or promote.
In the end, PERC can make the difference between getting your product/service out on a cluttered market where it isn’t easy to stand out from others or having a clear path that leads directly to your potential customers.
Get in touch with us for more information about how we can help you! Please schedule A Free Consultation Today or Call 612-254-6300!
