How to Define Your Target Audience

In this modern age of marketing, defining your target audience is one of the most crucial steps you need to take to secure the success of your business.  

Taking the general approach or trying to appeal to everyone is the fastest way to fail.  

But, having a clear understanding of who your potential customers are allows you to create an effective marketing strategy, focus your marketing efforts cost-effectively, and drive results.

Unfortunately, not everyone realizes the importance of defining their target audience first.  

A lot of business owners often make the mistake of attempting to serve every segment or demographics possible. They also assume that they know who their prospects are inside out. Because of this, their marketing campaigns are less effective and they’re not getting the results they were expecting.  

If you’re guilty of committing this marketing crime, don’t be afraid to take a step back and reevaluate who you want to direct your marketing to. Luckily for you, this article will help you determine the right target audience for your brand.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a specific group of people who share the same characteristics, demographic, or behavior, and are likely to be interested in your products or services. They could be defined by their age, gender, interests, political beliefs, location, and so on.  

How to Define Your Target Audience

Conduct Market Research‍

The first step to defining your target audience is to conduct market research. Doing this allows you to gather information and understand them better.

Here are some important questions to ask:

• Who will most likely use your products or services? Or, who’s currently using them?
• What is the average age of your customer base?
• Are they mostly female or male?
• Where are they located?
• What is their income level?
• Are they single or married?

Once you have your answers, you need to further subdivide your target market into groups with similar characteristics or use multi-segment marketing. Then, conduct more research to understand them better - which brings us to our next point...

Understand Your Target Audience’s Purchase Path and Pain Points

Now that you’ve subdivided your audience into different groups, it’s time to identify each of their purchase paths and pain points.  

But first, let’s explain what these two are.  

Purchase path refers to the different marketing mediums your audiences use or are exposed to that convinces them to make a purchase. These mediums include everything from emails, apps, websites, social media, loyalty programs, and so on.  

Mapping out your audiences’ purchase paths gives you an idea of which channels you should focus more on so you can reach them effectively and guarantee that they convert.  

On the other hand, pain points are basically your audiences’ problems. Bear in mind that different audiences or groups have different problems,  

To simplify things, we’re giving you the four main types of pain points, along with brief descriptions below:

• Financial Pain Points: Your prospects are spending too much money on the products or services they’re currently using and they want to lessen their spending.
• Support Pain Points: Your prospects are not getting the service or support they need during crucial stages of the sales process.
• Productivity Pain Points: Your prospects feel like they’re wasting too much time on the products or services that they’re currently using and they want to be more productive.
• Process Pain Points: These are areas where a business is creating friction for their buyers due to incompetent internal processes.  

Knowing each of your audience’s pain points and their purchase paths allows you to reach out through the right channels and position your company in a way that will help solve their problems.  

For instance, if your prospect’s pain points are mainly financial, you’ll want your marketing message to emphasize that you offer quality products or services for a more affordable price.

However, if your prospect’s pain points are primarily support, then make sure to highlight your excellent customer service in your marketing message, ads, and promotions.  

Additionally, discovering your audience’s purchase paths and pain points enables you to build content that addresses those problems and tailor them to move your target audience down the sales funnel.  

Once you’ve identified them, it’s time to choose which specific group or segment you want to direct your marketing efforts into. But if you can manage serving several segments at once, the better.  

Take a look at these steps to find out which segment suits you:  

• Determine which segment is the most profitable.
• Identify which group of people you can relate to the most.  It’ll be easier to create a messaging strategy that speaks to your segment directly, and reach out to them if you can empathize with them.
• Identify which problems your business can effectively solve without compromising anything.
• Research your competition to know which group of people they’re already targeting and gauge if you can differentiate yourself from your competition - enough to make them switch to you.
• Test your idea

Get to Know Your Existing Customers

Another way of defining your target audience is to learn more about your existing customers.  

Consider asking these questions:

• Why do your customers buy from you and not from your competition?
• How do your customers use your products?
• How do your products or services solve your customers’ problems?
• What prompts them to purchase?

There are several ways you can collect information, including the following:

• Check your website and social media analytics to see who’s visiting your site and engaging with your content. Study how they navigate through it and which pages they frequent the most. You should also check who’s interacting with your social media accounts
• Use Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and HubSpot to gain more information about your customers

Now that you know who your existing customers are, you may now duplicate them and ask Facebook to find the same group of people that haven’t interacted with your brand.  

Need Help Defining Your Target Audience?

Finding the right people to direct your marketing efforts to can be an exhausting task.  

But, with the right team of experts, you will be able to determine who your target audience is in no time!

At Digital Resource, we can help you define your target audience and create digital marketing strategies that are tailored to reach them effectively. From services like custom web design, improving multimedia content, SEO, paid advertising, and expert analytics, we can help boost your brand awareness online and drive results.  

Get in touch with us today for a free consultation!