How to identify and target your ideal audience for your online business
A well targeted audience can save one’s marketing efforts and budget from going to waste and offer your services directly to the kind of audience that would be willing to pay and/or engage with it.
What defines a ‘target audience’?
A target audience can be differentiated depending on their lifestyle, their age, gender, location, demographics, how much time they spend online, which of your competitor accounts they engage with, and a lot more.
People often believe that the selection of the target audience is most crucial when you’re planning an advertising campaign. However, more often than not, a target audience should be part of every little decision you make– be it product design, product development, service availability, etc.
Types of Target Audiences
- Interested in a purchase – This audience is driven to your brand when they’re looking for a specific product type. For example, it’s better to market your toddler care products to new moms than a teenager with a Diaper Ad running in the middle of a video game they’ve been playing.
- Audience targeted based on their hobbies – When you know that someone is interested in fashion, it’s easier to promote your product that falls in the same category, with a knowledge that they may be more likely to engage and purchase your product, than someone who has no care for the world of fashion.
- Culture-based targeting – When your audience is regularly engaging with a particular culture or trending celebrity, movie, etc; it gives you a better idea of their interests and the products that they’ll like based on them. For example, an Anime Fan should be targeted Anime Ads, to gain their best interest.
The Benefits of Identifying Your Target Audience
One of the most important reasons for identifying your target audience is to make it easier for you to learn product placement, which season to market a product, what platform to market it on and how long to market it for.
For example, if you know that your target audience will purchase winter clothes only from November through March, there’s no point in marketing it through summer.
Similarly, if your target audience is teenagers looking for Cloud Bags on Instagram, you should concentrate on marketing your product there instead of Snapchat, Facebook or Twitter.
Knowing your audience helps you define better offers for them that leads to more engagement and sales.
Being in the know-about of your ideal target audience also makes it easier for your team to work on the Ad Copy, Design and more, keeping the audience’s best interest in mind.
How to Identify Your Idea Target Audience
1. Piece together your ideal audience
The first step in this process is to put together an ideal audience based on their psychographics and demographics such as age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, past purchases, etc.
If you have an e-commerce website, you can also easily put together a group of shoppers who regularly purchase from you in this set or create a target audience based on them.
2. Conduct Market Research
Often, brands are afraid to conduct market research with the thought that their product might get leaked. However, this is a very crucial step to know the success of your product and without it, all marketing efforts can go to vain.
Marketing Research can help you understand the threats prevailing in the market and the products/ services that are most trending/ useful to your audience at present.
3. Do a Competitor Analysis
As time consuming as this process may be, performing a competitor analysis is crucial to know how your product can stand out amongst the masses.
This research can help you understand your USP (Unique Selling Point) and use it to your benefit while planning ad campaigns.
Also understand the problems that your audience is facing while using the competitor’s products and work on coming up with a solution for that in your final product.
4. Directly Engage With Your Audience
What’s better than directly asking your audience what they need and providing them with just that?
Run Surveys, give out a social media Q&A on your stories and analyze the answer to provide a better and ideal product or service for your audience.
In conclusion, to get an ideal audience, you have to place yourself as the ideal brand and your product as an ideal product. To do this, make sure you do proper research, find solutions to your consumer’s problems and provide value to them!
And if you’re too busy building your business empire, let us make things easier for you and handle the digital part of it! Check out our Digital Marketing Services or connect with us on +971 55 104 8686 and we’ll be happy to guide you!