Having a clear definition of how your target audience likes is essential for creating a marketing plan that leads to real growth in revenue.
However, small business owners or start-ups often choose to “target” anyone who is interested in their products or services. They don’t see why they should go after a specific group of people for making money in the long run. Even if some put effort to define their target audience, they tend to go after really broad categories like “homeowners” or “teenagers”.
If you are hesitating because the process sounds time-consuming and exhausting, this article will give you a shortcut to defining your target audience quickly.
What is a Target Audience?
Target audience refers to the group of people that are most likely to be interested in your product or service. And members of this group share common interests (e.g – problems, challenges, hobbies, etc.). As they stay on the journey of potentially buying your offer, you should bring your business’s online presence to their attention.
The target audience may be indicated by age, gender, income, location, interests, or a combination of other factors.
Defining Your Target Audience
Knowing the importance of describing a business’s target audience clearly, here’s a simple process anyone can take to draw their potential buyer.
1 – Interview your customers
One of the fastest ways to define your target audience is to look at customers who already purchased your product or service. How old are they, where do they live, what are their common interests?
You can easily set up an interview with 4-5 of them to dig deeper into how they are like. Everyone is happy when the seller cares about their opinions, experience, and feelings.
2 – Study your competitor
Another shortcut method is to look at your competitors. You will find out a lot more than just points for describing the audience, for instance:
- Who are they commonly selling to?
- Do they upsell the current customers?
- Which digital marketing channels are they approaching?
- Do they go after any offline channels?
3 – Look at data on Google Analytic
One more tip, however, this one requires you to have set up and got data on Google Analytics for a few months (at least a quarter).
Google Analytics offers extensive reports about the users visiting your site. This information can be leveraged to determine key insights such as
- What channels your target audience is coming fro
- What type of content they’re engaging and connecting with the most
- Where they come from geographically
- What system they are using to view your site
Information from these reports allows you to make more data-driven decisions during the digital marketing planning process.
4 – Create personas
After trying different ways to study your current customers, competitors, and people visiting your site, it’s time to gather all of the information into one place and create a detailed document of your target audience, which is also called “personas”. Here’s a checklist you can apply while creating your Personas document.
- Who are they?
- Age
- Gende
- Location
- Job
- Income
- What problems/challenges are they facing
- Difficulties – Pain points
- Goals – Values
- How can you help them
- Solution – focus product/service
- Why should they use your solution
- Benefits
HandmadeSEO developed a tool and specific method to help ease this process of defining the target audience. We put data into one place and the system can automatically generate useful reports to support creating marketing strategies.
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