If you’re aiming for a target, you need to know exactly what you are trying to hit. That’ll help you get your aim just right. Just ask any archers who are always focused on the bullseye. The same philosophy applies when considering how to find your target audience.
When it comes to business, your target is your brand audience. Getting to know the people to which you are aiming your brand can be a huge help and is often a crucial element of business. If your brand isn’t appealing to your intended audience, then there’s not much chance of it being a success.
There’s just one slight problem that many entrepreneurs face — defining their exact brand audience can be extremely tricky. Even if you have been in business for years, trying to pinpoint a target audience can still be a sticky subject. The bullseye might shift or change over time; what once was a straight aim could result in your arrow landing flat on the floor.
Reading through this blog post will give you a helping hand. Keep reading to find seven actionable steps that will show you how to find your target audience without any hiccups.
What Exactly Is a Brand Audience?
For any brand newbies here, before we discuss how to find your target audience, let’s discuss what exactly is a brand audience. Essentially, it’s the group of people who are buying your products or using your services. Your customers!
Any brand audience is going to be made up of similar people. For instance, if you’re producing high-quality baby clothing and have a small store in Nebraska, then your products are likely to be bought by middle-class parents with children aged between 0–3 years old who live in the Midwest. There’s no reason for teenagers to be interested in your company as you aren’t selling anything that would appeal to them — so that’s one demographic you can strike from your brand audience.
What if your products or services aren’t quite that niche? It should still be simple enough to define your brand audience, you just might have to think a bit harder about it.
How to Find Your Target Audience
1. Carry out an audit
One of the first steps in figuring out how to find your target audience is, probably quite obviously, to think about who your current brand audience is. You should be able to get a pretty good general insight into this if you spend time evaluating your product and analyzing what it offers the public. Who wants to buy it the most?
However, it’s not just your own audience that you should consider when carrying out this research. Think about your competitor’s brand audience as well. Even though you may be offering similar services or products, there could be some nuanced differences between the groups of people you are targeting. Figuring these slight differences out can give you some insider knowledge on how you could further tweak your strategies around your target.
If you take a deep dive into your target audience, you can find out whether they are actually buying from you. If not, the data should hopefully make it clear as to how you can change that.
2. Refine the target audience
Once you’ve done your audit, you should have a really good picture of your audience. Are you sure this is the right audience for your product/service? In order to figure this out, you just need to keep asking which demographics you think should be within your current target. If these demographics that you decide on don’t match your audience, then it will be necessary to reconsider exactly who you are targeting. Ask yourself the same questions over and over again until you finally have your perfect target audience.
3. Be confident in your decision
Are you sure you are happy with this target audience? Like, really happy? You need to be happy knowing that targeting this audience will generate a profit. If you have doubts about this group of people being the right one for your product or service, or you think that perhaps what you sell is out of their budget, it’s best to go back to square one and revaluate the best target audience for your brand.
4. Come up with an audience persona
There’s nothing to say that your brand’s target audience can’t change over time. If it does, then you might end up slipping off of your customers’ radars. To keep you on target, create an audience persona of certain characteristics and interests that will match those of your target customers. Don’t just keep this to yourself — let everyone in your company know. Then everyone in your team will be focused on getting the brand noticed by the right kind of people.
5. Start targeting them!
It’s easy to end up a little too excited when you have a brand-new marketing campaign to launch. If all that excitement gets to your head, you might end up blindly shooting out campaigns and forgetting about them. Don’t expect them to hit the right target!
To ensure each campaign hits the right people, know which channels your target audience are likely to check on a regular basis. Putting your campaign out on these channels will then have a much higher click rate with your target. One idea that can help you figure out the best channels is to see what your competitors are doing — how are they rolling out their targeted campaigns?
The takeaway from this is to always have a plan for your campaigns. This plan should help you realize that this is, in fact, the right target audience to aim for, and the best way to reach them. Shooting off a campaign without a plan could see it quickly sink!
6. Keep on analyzing
Audiences are naturally growing, developing, and adapting, so it makes sense that your brand’s target will eventually change over time. Using brand analytics can help you monitor changes. For example, your data will show you whether it’s the same people who are still engaging with your brand, or if one particular demographic loses interest. It’s not just about losing audiences, though — you might win some as well! Segmenting data should show any new audiences that start to pop up on the radar.
Being able to change and shift in order to meet your new audience’s needs and demands can help your brand become stronger. No matter which demographics you lose or gain, you’ll be rolling with the punches and making the most of these new opportunities!
Things don’t just stop once you’ve defined your brand audience. You need to ensure that they will be loyal and stick with your company no matter what. To do this, you need to build a relationship with them.
Your customers will have various needs and wants, and as they all belong to your target audience, you have the upper hand knowing that they will all be similar. Do what you can to keep your audience happy and appeal to whatever it is they need from you. This should also help you build trust, one of the cornerstones of any long-running relationship. Check out this blog post to find out more about the importance of becoming a trusted brand.
Use These Steps to Find Your Target Audience and Reap All The Benefits
There is no getting away from the fact that defining a brand audience is important to every company right now. Getting it right will elevate you above your competitors and will cause all your target customers to flock to your brand. And more customers mean bigger profits!
Follow all of these steps to and you will no longer have to ask yourself how to find your target audience. Once you do, you’ll be ever closer to creating a strong brand identity!
Originally published at https://www.latana.com.
