The focus of any campaign is the target audience – a brand’s desired consumer. However, many brands and companies aren’t sure who makes up their target market. Identifying your audience will help your brand create better and more effective campaigns. Defining your target market enables you to create the right content for your audience and understand how to connect with them. Once you have insight into your audience, you can continue to develop it while increasing brand awareness and driving conversions.
Identifying Your Target Audience
The first step in creating an effective marketing strategy is identifying your target audience or demographic. By visualizing your target customer, your brand will be able to figure out whether you are focused on the right market.
Create Personas
Most brands have a loose idea of who is in their target audience, but they might not be able to define exactly who they are marketing to. A great way to identify the ideal demographic is to create personas or target market descriptions.
A persona (or demographic profile) is a fictional character who exhibits the traits possessed by a typical member of your target audience. A brand needs to collect some basic data on their target audience – age, location, gender, to name a few – but once they have an idea of those factors, it’s easy to put together a persona. Demographic profiles provide a way to visualize your target market so that you can determine if your content and marketing strategy is the most effective way to reach them.
Examine Customer Interactions
Look at your existing customers – are they aligned with your demographic profile? If not, you may need to consider rethinking your targeted market or your current strategy. Depending on which form(s) of social media you use, take advantage of the analytics to examine user behavior. Monitoring your social accounts will provide clues to see who is interacting with your brand. Considering their bios can help you identify who you’re currently reaching and whether they are in line with your targeted audience.
Google, Twitter, Instagram, and more have built in features that enable you to evaluate how consumers are interacting with your brand. Review the comments, likes, and shares and use these to help define your target audience.
Review Your Competitors
If you’re having trouble determining your target audience and their personas, another way to identify your target demographic is to review your competitors. Looking into who follows your competitors and who they market to can give brands a good idea of their target audience. It can also help brands see what kind of content and what marketing strategies have the highest engagement with their competitors.
Develop Your Target Audience
Once you have identified your target demographics, it’s important to cultivate an understanding of your audience so that you can best market to them. Understanding your consumers is the best way to ensure that you are marketing your product or services to them in the most effective way possible.
Monitor Content Performance
Once you know who makes up your targeted demographic, continue to develop that audience through tracking your content performance. Determining which posts perform the best – receiving the highest number of likes and greatest engagement – will help define your marketing strategy to continue reaching customers that align with your brand’s values.
Monitoring customer and follower interactions gives further insight into your follower demographics. This enables you to figure out which media and marketing messages are the most effective and will drive engagement and conversions.
Analyze Audience Feedback
Is your content performing well with your target audience? Find out by cultivating conversation with your audience and reviewing their opinions. You can find this out through social listening or by interacting with your customers or through customer surveys. Polling your audience can provide valuable insight into what content works and what doesn’t.
Audience feedback helps brands figure out how their product or service fits the needs and/or wants of their customers. Targeted marketing shows the consumer why they should purchase a product or service in response to their needs.
Before a brand can create a compelling and relevant marketing strategy, they should identify their target audience. This can be achieved through creating ideal demographic profiles, getting to know your audience through customer interactions, and reviewing your competitors. Once you have the desired consumer profile, continue tracking your audience to ensure that your marketing efforts are attracting the correct people.
How else to you target and develop your audience? Share your ideas in the comments below!
