What is a Target Audience?
A target audience is the demographic of people determined internally to be interested in your products or services. Businesses use their target audience to create “personas” that guide their sales and marketing processes.
Discovering your target audience means determining who is interested in your product or service, which means looking at demographic information like gender, age, industry, location, and more.
In order to connect with your potential customers or clients, it’s necessary to create a sense of comfortability with your company. This can be through a variety of channels: paid ads, blog content, thought leadership pieces, and more.
Your target audience can be broad or narrow depending on your company’s ability or your product’s ability to sell. Ultimately, your target audience is determined by consumer behavior, and the ability to understand that consumer behavior provides you the ability to make money for your business.
Why is a Target Audience Important?
Without determining your target audience, it can be difficult to grow your business. Knowing your target audience can dictate how you advertise, how you conduct campaigns, how you develop and distribute content, and even how you establish your online presence.
If your business works in the B2B space, Facebook advertising may not be the most efficient channel compared to Google or LinkedIn advertising. Adversely, an e-commerce business can thrive on Facebook advertising as it provides a platform to connect with a specific target audience who have more buyer’s intent.
Understanding your target audience can also provide insights on when to post content and how to build out user experience on your website. Being able to create a succinct message that applies to your audience allows you to communicate effectively with potential customers.
With such a specific target audience, you already know who you want to meet and how you’ll reach them, avoiding inefficiencies across all marketing and sales channels.
How Do You Find Your Target Audience?
To identify your target audience, you must ask yourself some pointed questions about your business and brand. Who does your product or service benefit? What are your unique value propositions? Who are my competitors?
Who does your Product or Service Benefit?
Understanding who your business services are important in determining your messaging, building out advertising campaigns, and creating a targeted sales list for future business. There can be multiple targeted audiences within a company, depending on the individual product or service provided.
Oracle sells a variety of software products for a variety of industry verticals. For example, they have small business and enterprise products which can be applicable to the healthcare or construction industries. The messaging across industries may differ, even if the product is the same or similar.
What are your Unique Value Propositions?
A unique value proposition (UVP) describes the benefit of your product, service, or business altogether. A UVP can describe how your company is better than competitors, how your business is going to solve a customer’s problem, and more.
More than likely, your target audience is a group of individuals or businesses looking for a solution to the same problem. For example, businesses looking to increase their internal supply chain efficiency with look for a company that sells supply chain software. Therefore, the supply chain software company will target other companies who may benefit from their product.
Who are My Competitors?
Understanding who your competitors are is crucial in determining your target audience. Competitors with the same target audience allow you to analyze targeting strategies, campaigns and messaging across various products and services. Competitors will differing target audiences gives you the opportunity to understand who not to target across campaigns and messaging.
This can be determined in a variety of ways. A lot of large companies have a clients list, case studies, and other resources that give you insights into their targeted audience. The insights you gather allow you to strategize how to integrate messaging across all sales and marketing channels.
Another concrete way to discover your target audience is through market research. This can be conducted through surveys, by offering special prices or coupon codes to those who visit your website or brick and mortar store and providing calls to action such as filling out forms or signing up for newsletters.
How Do You Reach Your Target Audience Once You've Found It?
Now that you’ve identified your target audience and know where to find them, you can begin building campaigns, write content, and more.
You can target specific keywords to trigger your ads and organic reach. You can also create blog posts, videos, and other web content around topics relevant to this demographic. Directive’s PPC and Content Marketing team is dedicated to growing your business online by identifying your target audience and capitalizing with world class search marketing.
Do you need help identifying your target audience and building campaigns that convert? You deserve better! Get a free proposal today!
