How to Identify Your Online Target Audience: Uncover the Keys to Effective Audience Analysis and Targeted Marketing

By this stage, we already published a variety of different articles on targeting and attracting the audience. However, the main question is how to actually identify your online target audience?

Your “target audience” is the overall audience you want to sell to or reach – it’s that simple.

Your target audience may include a specific group of demographics, such as men in their 20’s, parents, or grandparents; location, such as people who live in Belfast; or behaviours and interests, such as sports lovers or videographers. Every target audience has specific interests and may engage differently with your campaigns.

Why Is Having a Target Audience Important?

Target audiences directly influence the marketing strategies of businesses, driving essential decisions like where to spend money on advertisements, how to attract new customers, and what types of products to produce next.

Knowing your targeting and attracting the right audience is vital to making your digital marketing efforts count. Depending on your brand or the objectives of the campaign, specific audiences may hold a higher value to you. Targeting high-value groups for your business and customizing messaging to reach a particular audience leads to a higher ROI.

Here’s how you can identify your online target audience in order to increase sales:

Define The Profile Of Your Intended Audience

To have a better understanding of your target audience and their online behaviour, you should ask yourself the following key questions:

• What’s my average client’s age, demographic and gender?
• What types of issues, needs, and interests my intended users may have?
• What value can my product or service give to my intended audience that could set my brand above the competition?
• How can my intended user benefit from my offering?
• What kind of social media platforms does my target audience utilize most?

These fundamental questions will give you a clear idea about profiling your intended audience effectively.

Build Your Target Audience

Who are your ideal customers?

Look at traits such as:

• Demographics: This information can include anything from age to gender, geography, to marital status.
• Psychographics: This information goes beyond the demographics and identifies more about a customer’s psychology, interests, values, attitudes, behaviours, and much more.
• Technographic: This information relates to the devices. Software and other “technical” attributes of your audience.

All types of information are essential in developing your customer profile. The demographic information will help in identifying the kind of person who will potentially buy your products and services. The psychographic information takes it a bit further and helps you to understand the reasoning behind why the customer may make the purchase. Lastly, the technographic piece helps you learn where to reach your different audiences and on what device.

 

Research

Regardless of marketing, you must know your competitors well to make an impact in your current market. But to find your target audience, and what they want, you’ll also need to better understand the competition. Pull together relevant information about your industry, the market, your competition, and most importantly, the broad potential customer you have identified. How have your competitors market their products/services, and to whom?

Another source for finding your target audience is your existing or best customers. If you want to find more of these people, find out what makes them tick.

What interests them? How did they find out about your product/service? What did they like or dislike about it? The more information you have, the easier it is to identify and reach your target audience.

 User Feedback Is Valuable

If you’re struggling to increase conversion even with best online marketing efforts, it might be a wise move to ask your customers for feedback. A custom-devised survey will get you insights into the online behaviour of existing and potential consumers.

This will allow you to fine-tune advertising campaigns and select the best marketing channels for future use.

For a bonus advertising boost, you can analyze existing traffic by the use of Google Analytics and see if website visitors are coming from social networks, marketing campaigns, or other referral sources. Based on website visitor analysis, you can get rid of unprofitable campaigns and focus on the most important traffic sources.

 

Make Your Google Analytics Efforts Count

Google Analytics is a highly comprehensive tool that can be utilized to gather demographic data about your customers and their interests. Google Analytics presents its users with insights in the form of different sections such as age, gender, and location of the target audience. This tool can be an excellent asset that’ll give you great insights into who’s coming to your website and how well your content fits into their daily routine.

How Often Should Target Audience Be Defined?

Once you begin marketing to your target audience, you may feel that your work is essentially done in this sector. Unfortunately, the task does not end after you launch your campaign and send out waves of advertising.

It is essential that you monitor the campaign performance to keep it competitive. How are people reacting to your ads? Are they clicking? Are they converting?

If your marketing isn’t practical for your target audience, you should adjust and adapt.  Or, perhaps the people you thought were your ideal customers aren’t the ones you should be trying to reach?

Your target audience may change as your business grows, and finding your target audience should be a continual effort. Regardless of where your business is, identifying your target audiences can push you one step closer to maximizing your ROI and reaching your overall business goals.

 

Are you interested in finding out more?

Vindicta Digital provides effective digital marketing services and helps drive more sales and revenue to your business. Visit our website to explore our expert services or contact us for personalized service.