As a business you want to gain as many customers as possible. This is done not by trying to get everyone’s business, but by learning how to find your target audience. This is the group of consumers most likely to be interested in your business. By finding and focusing on your target audience you will make more sales, only get the kind of work you really like doing and be more profitable overall. Don’t waste your resources trying to get everyone’s business. Instead, focus on your ideal client and increase your revenue.
What Are You Looking For?
Before you learn how to find your target audience, you need to understand what exactly you’re looking for. What does your ideal customer look like? Use tools like Google Analytics to find their demographics like age, gender, occupation, lifestyle, etc. The more you know who your target audience is and how they live, the easier it will be to determine what content and services will appeal to them.
Next, you’ll need to understand customer behavior as it relates to your business. Look at your current customers’ purchase history and frequency, email marketing open rates, and website interaction habits. Lastly, it’s important to understand your consumer’s motivations. What are they searching for and how can you help?
These are the core fundamentals of discovering your target audience. As abstract as some of these concepts may seem, there is actually a plethora of data about them at your fingertips. Gathering and analyzing this information is the first step to learning all about your target audience.
Look At Website Performance
Potential and current customers visit your website every day, making this platform a great place to discover your target audience. Take a look at your website’s performance, specifically each page’s visit volume and retention. Analyze how many people visit your webpages and how many of those visits turn into leads. Google Analytics can help here too by compiling plenty of performance data for each webpage and organizing it into comparable sections. This way you can see and understand engagement metrics. From here you can determine what webpages visitors are most interested in and adjust your content from there.
Get Feedback from Current Customers
The more you learn about your current customers, the better equipped you’ll be to grow your target audience. Ask current customers to fill out surveys and find out firsthand which of your marketing strategies are working and which your audience doesn’t resonate with. These valuable insights will show you what to focus your time on and what to cut to maintain your target audience.
Don’t stop learning after you’ve made some changes though. Continue to monitor customer feedback, comments, and engagement to see how your new strategies are playing out and if your audience is responding well. Not only will this give you a look into your customers’ minds, but it will also help build a relationship of trust.
Create a Buyer Persona
Now that you’ve gathered the data, it’s time to organize it so you can find your target audience. One way to do this is to create buyer personas or overviews of what your ideal customer looks like using data such as their age, gender, employment, and location.
Creating a buyer persona will put the information you’ve found in a format that’s easier to understand and view. Instead of statistics and lists of demographics, you will have a clear picture of your ideal customers. Then it’s time to pick the buyer personas that are the most profitable and make those your target audience. Remember, you should only focus on your most likely customers.
Learn More from Social Media
Your website isn’t the only platform you can gather audience data on. Social media platforms also have plenty of information available and offer data collection tools similar to websites. If your business is active on social media, you can potentially get more traffic from it than websites. Social media platforms also give you access to other audiences you might not get through search engines, email campaigns, or print marketing.
Looking at the demographics from social media platforms will tell you where to engage. For example, for business-to-business sales you should use LinkedIn over TikTok. For business to customer sales, however, it would be just the opposite. Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, and every other social media platform will have their unique demographic of users. Regardless of what platform you decide to use, take note of the content your followers engage with the most. Are they interested in a specific topic or form of content? Learn what your audience is most interested in and deliver it to them.
Ready to Find Your Target Audience?
Learning how to find your target audience is complicated but necessary to build a profitable business. Narrowing down your target audience can help you budget your time and money toward consumers already interested in what you’re selling. Look at demographics and other customer data gathered from your website, social media platforms, and surveys to find the specific audience who needs your business the most. In doing so you will eliminate ineffective marketing campaigns and gain loyal customers who need your business.
Need help finding your target audience? It takes a lot of time, tools, and skill to collect and organize the data needed to determine your ideal customer profile. Strategy can help manage this process for you so you can focus on running your business. Schedule a free consultation with Strategy where we use proven lead generation solutions that will drive conversions and generate leads.
