Target Audiences: How to Find the Right People for Your Product or Service
All of us want to succeed. In any venture, that remains the same no matter how you plan to achieve it. And when it comes to marketing, the key to achieving any kind of success—no matter the specifics of your business—is understanding your target audience.
Without a basic understanding of who they are, how can you know what your audience wants, what will appeal to them, or how your business can help? You can’t. I mean, sure, you could throw a ton of theoretical spaghetti at the wall, and chances are some of it would stick, but why waste your time and energy on directions that turn out to be the wrong ones for your business. Understanding your audience means you can work smarter—not harder.
How To Narrow In on Your Target Audience
By narrowing in on your specific audience and targeting your content to them, your marketing strategy can become far more strategically effective. Simply put, it is impossible to cater to everyone. So don’t try.
Creating quality content is important, but it is also essential to create the right content for your crowd. Stick to topics that will appeal to your existing or desired customer’s demographics, and don’t worry about everyone else. As for how to make that happen, the first step in understanding your target audience is just asking yourself some basic questions:
- Who are my current customers?
- Why is my product or service important? What problem(s) does it solve?
- Who is my competition?
- Why should customers choose my product or service over my competitors’?
In terms of your competition, doing this research on the frontend can give you insight into what competitors are doing with their content and marketing strategy. Which means then you can learn how to do it even better.
Your ultimate goal is to create content that your audience will care about; it needs to speak to them. Answering these questions should give you a pretty good idea of why you should create certain content and who is going to be reading it, which makes figuring out what content to create even easier. Once you’ve done the legwork, you should be able to fill in the blanks in this statement:
My business creates content to help ______ do ______ better.
How To Create Content That Caters to Your Target Audience
Content is a powerful tool in your overall marketing strategy that’s made even more powerful when strategically catered to your target audience. It’s not about what you like as far as content goes for your business; it’s about creating marketing content that is meaningful to your potential or current customers.
One of the most important guideposts in the creation of meaningful content is understanding the problems your audience is looking to solve or learn about. Positioning your business as a resource for your target audience is a big part of creating success, and this means that the content you create should connect to your audience in a real and meaningful way.
Questions to ask while creating content for your audience:
- What are my audience’s interests?
- What are the problems my audience face that need solutions?
- What keeps are the questions that keep my audience up at night?
- What does my audience think about the most on any given day?
Once you understand their questions, struggles, and commitments you can create your core content around the things that have meaning for them.
5 Key Tips for Outlining and Refining Your Target Audience
- Reader Personas
Creating personas for your target audience is a great way to get a well-rounded picture of the types of people you want to market towards. It gives you a visual of who you are catering to and the struggles they face—that you can help them address.
Creating these personas requires gathering data on your existing customers. Keep in mind that you are trying to build a picture of your audience, so the more data points you have, the more complete your picture becomes. Check out Hubspot’s Persona Templates to get started.
Consider their:
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Spending Patterns
- Interests
- Challenges
- Life Stage
2. Surveys
Conducting user surveys is an excellent way to gather data and gain insight into what is important to your audience. Thankfully, there are tons of options for building surveys, and even helpful templates you can use to get started.
Automated surveys checking in with people who sign up for your newsletter, etc. can be an effective opportunity, but surveys are not a one and done situation. Conducting an annual audience survey is a great way to check in again and get a feel for where your target audience is and what their needs are over time.
3. Active Engagement
Surveys give you a lot of useful information, but they are not the be all, end all. It is easy to become detached when your only insights are coming from something static and comparatively impersonal like surveys. You must dig deeper and stay connected with your audience in a genuine way. People are emotional, loyal creatures, and a simple connection is often the reason a person will choose one business over another.
Thankfully, establishing that connection doesn’t have to be some overly complicated strategy. When someone sends your business a message, respond. Every time. When someone comments on your product or service, take the time to thoughtfully acknowledge their comments. Connecting with your audience every time they reach out builds their trust and a real connection to your business.
4. Analytics & Insights
No matter the tracking platform(s) your business may be utilizing (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, etc.), taking a look at the data collected from the given platforms gives you a great deal of information to help you hone in on your strategy.
This data is such a boon in figuring out what is working and what isn’t. It can show you which content did well, what got shared most, and what content your audience is spending the most time reading. From there, repeat and ideate upon what works and tweak what doesn’t. Keeping up to date on how your audience is responding to your content will help you continually improve.
5. Avoid Assumptions
It is easy to fall into assumptions about your target audience. Whether the assumption is that your audience knows your industry’s lingo or even that they care about your brand at all, assumptions hurt your marketing strategy.
It’s an easy enough concept to prattle on about, but actually avoiding the pitfalls of assumptions is so much more difficult. In reality, we all make assumptions. Every day we jump ahead of those data steps to speed along interactions and move towards progress in our ventures.
We often assume that those we come into contact with will have a similar understanding to what we ourselves have. We use language of familiar subjects with little thought to whether our actual audience will understand. This is (of course) not malicious or intentionally condescending, but it certainly can come across that way. Stick to the data to avoid the potential messy outcome of alienating your audience.
Above all else, keep in mind that your content is not a sales pitch. It’s about connection—providing the aid or information your audience is looking for. Praising your product, services, or yourself is not going to create the sense of connection you need to succeed. No matter how cool your product or how useful your service, your audience isn’t looking to your content for a smooth-talking pitch. They are looking for advice or information that is relevant to them, and you just so happen to be in a position to share it.
Always remember that your content is about your audience and what they need. By honing in on your target audience, you can gain the insights required to become what they need: a trusted source of information. And, when the time comes that they need your product or service, too, they’ll already know who to trust.
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