How to Reach Your Target Audience

Spending money on marketing without knowing how to reach your target audience is a costly mistake you don’t want to make, this article will help.

How to reach your target audience

 

Effective marketing is built on knowing who wants your product and how to persuade them to buy it ie: your target audience.

By having a thorough understanding of your target audience, you can cater content and messages to them where they are and when they’re most likely to be looking. Throughout this article, we’ll take a look at how to find and reach your target audience. 

Understanding Your Target Audience

Your target audience’s personalities, lifestyles, viewpoints, interests, and much more will directly influence your marketing efforts.

For example, if you’re selling a tech product to restaurants, you’re not going to captivate them by launching an ad during the Super Bowl because the majority of restaurant managers/owners won’t see it. However, if you know that the target audience is interested in particular magazines, placing your ads in these will be much more fruitful. 

As well as improving your bottom line, having a thorough understanding of the target audience will help when it comes to building a strong rapport. Also, you will be able to target communication to specific personas within the audience. This is critical as brands with personalized content and offers are 80% more likely to convert a sale. 

Types of Target Audiences

The wider target audience can be broken down into subcultures, purchase intention, and subcultures – here’s what all this means in practice:

  • Subcultures. These are groups of people who weigh shared experiences including entertainment fans and people into specific music genres. Understanding subcultures within the target audience will help you to tailor products and content to an even smaller group of people.
  • Purchase intention. Everyone searching online has search intent, and you need to find what these are within the target audience. Understanding intent will help you to identify pain points, which you can alleviate through your services. 
  • Interest. Split your audience into groups based on interests, like music preferences and hobbies. Doing this will allow you to create customized experiences, which will lead to return business. 

Target Audience Vs Target Market

Many businesses use target market and audience interchangeably, but there’s a distinct difference between them. For example, your target market is a group of customers that your business plans to reach out to or make sales to, as per their marketing activities. On the other hand, a target audience refers to the groups of people within the target market, which is being targeted for specific marketing content.

How to Establish Your Target Audience

When establishing the target audience, it’s essential to spend time observing consumer data. Doing this will help you to build an audience profile that’s based on accurate data. The following steps should help you to determine the target audience:

  • Carry out market research to find trends. Look for ways your product can fill gaps in the market. 
  • Perform client interviews. Talk to your audience to find out about their interests and demographics – you can even leverage social media to do this effectively. 
  • Run Competitor analytics. Your strongest competitors are in the position they are for a reason – because they’re doing something right. There’s nothing wrong with learning from your competitors, which you can do by conducting competitor analytics. 
  • Write down who your audience isn’t. There will be a fine line between your audience that engages and doesn’t. Knowing who doesn’t fit the bill will help you direct content to the correct people.
  • Constant revisions. Your business will change over time, meaning your target may change – make sure you make constant changes.
  • Log into Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to use and will give you extensive data on who is visiting your website and how they’re interacting. 

Creating Audience Personas

Once you’ve established who your target audience is, there’s plenty of benefit in creating an audience persona. Doing this will elevate your content delivery because you’re speaking to “one” person instead of a whole group.

When building your audience persona, consider the following:

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Location
  • Income
  • Education and profession
  • Hobbies
  • Marital status
  • Trusted sources/outlets
  • Reading/watching habits

Reaching Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience and having a detailed persona is only the first hurdle – you’ve got to reach them. There are countless ways to put your message in front of your audience, and we’ll spend the rest of this article looking into these.

Social Media

There are more than 4.26 billion social media users worldwide, and your target audience makes up part of this. Therefore, spend time to find out where they “hang out” online and make sure you’ve got an active profile. You will be surprised at how many new leads will come from social media comments and messages. 

Media Kits

Media/press kits refer to a collection of promotional materials, which are designed to inform news outlets about how to properly discuss a business. When choosing which outlets to send media kits to, it’s essential to determine which will have the largest primary reach to your customers. 

Third-Party Support

Reaching your target audience isn’t always easy, which is why there are dedicated B2B lead Generation companies out there that will happily bring your business up to date. These services will help with branding and target audience building, and they can be scaled to cater to your business. 

Email

Email is still one of the most used and interacted with forms of marketing, and there’s plenty of ROI proof to back this up. However, when launching an email campaign, you need to target the correct group within the target audience and it’s essential to schedule them at the correct time. After all, there’s no point in sending emails out at night if your target audience is more active online during the day. 

Businesses rely on their target audience to increase and sustain trade levels. Working out your target audience may take a while, but it’s relatively straightforward if you follow the short guide above. There are plenty of proven methods of reaching your target audience but leaving it to a professional who deals in lead generation may be more beneficial to your business. 

 

Wrapping Up

Understanding who your target audience is will allow you to carve a niche for your business by addressing very specific issues or pain points. Using your niche to your advantage will help gain a competitive edge and will allow you to draw in new customers and retain your current demographic.

Your ultimate goal is to craft personalized messaging to a specific group of people so that they understand why choosing you is a benefit.