A guide to help you find your true target audience!!

Successful marketing typically starts with knowing “how to find your true web audience”. After all, how can you start creating effective content before you know who your audience is? And given the present situation of the economy, building a well-defined web audience is not that easy as it seems. Implementing a good marketing strategy takes time; trust me, a lot of it. You just can’t simply waste that precious time with a page of content that is not perfectly focused on your actual target market.Content that speaks to the interest of your true web audience will automatically translate into more people using your products and services. However, for ensuring this, you must have a clear and concise idea of who you want to target before you begin creating your business’ content marketing plan.

Why finding your target audience is so prudent?

First of all, it’s important because it’s crucial for the overall success of your business. And secondly, when you focus solely on the people, who are most keen to buy your products and services, there is a bilateral advantage, and i.e. you offer your resources to the right people, and your customers spend their time and money on what actually they require.

Additionally, evaluating your target audience also enables you to:

–         Find out how much demand is out there for your services.

–         Modify and customize those services to better meet customer’s expectations and needs.

–         Build a marketing campaign that reaches to the right people, using the language and resources that most likely interests them.

But, the major question here is how do you identify those customers? How do you know who your actual target audience is?

This is exactly what this blog will cover. So, let’s straightaway get to main part-identifying the true web audience for your company’s website.

Discussed below are a few effective tips for doing so:

1.)   Start with analyzing your existing customers:

The very first step in evaluating your target audience for your content marketing campaign is probably to analyze customers who are currently involved and engaged with your business. Your current customers, and especially, the repeated ones, will give you an insight into the kind of people who are presently finding your services to be useful and interesting. Utilize the data you currently have on your customer demographics and further, find out who those people are who are purchasing from you. Are they corporate owners? Are they budget-conscious or wealthy? Are they from the same industry? What features do they have in common? And most importantly, why are they choosing your service?

Besides if you want to identify particularly those web audiences who will bring you the most business then focus completely on your customers who are currently bringing the most money into your business.

2.)   Find out what your website needs to do for your business:

There are numerous things that your company’s website can do-

–         generate productive leads for your sales team

–         improve your reputation among potential customers

–         attract more investors

–         build a successful online community for prospective customers, etc

This step is very important. Remember never to re-launch your existing website or build a new one without finding out the main objective and which business goal the website is fulfilling.

3.)  Develop a customer profile:

The people who are most interested in buying your products and services will always share certain characteristics. The first step for identifying these characteristics is to put together a thorough customer profile. A customer profile is mainly a detailed description of the target demographic which includes the following:

–         Gender

–         Age

–         Income level

–         Location

–         Industry or occupation

–         Interties

–         Hobbies and so on.

4.)  Do careful market research:

To identify your target audience, you must also know your competitors to make a change in your own current market, but to know your target audience well, you also need to understand the competition. So, for this, gather information about the market, competition, your industry, and most importantly, the prospective customers you have identified. Always remember that the more relevant information you have, the simpler it is to evaluate and reach your true web audience.

Moreover, for thorough market research, you can do the following:

–         Interviews: Communicate with people you trust and whose buying habits conform to your business.

–         Surveys: Provide online surveys to your potential and existing customers via e-mail, or other web-based services.

–         Get feedback: Get reviews and feedback from consumers who perfectly fit your customer profile through various group discussions and other sessions.

5.)  Use your knowledge and create quality content:

Content creation is also a very vital step that will help you find your target audience. You must always create quality and genuine contents that your audience will want to read and engage with. Your contents need to suit the target audience you have shortlisted. For this, you must always use topics and language that they can identify easily and relate with. Create content about things that will give them importance, rather than just providing them a sheet filled with unknown words and sentences. Make sure to keep the content interesting by including quality videos, images, and infographics.

Creating content to identify your audience is all good, however, it also needs to reach their inbox.  So, avoid using many spam trigger words and sentences and remember to write the content in upper case to a minimum. Also, pay attention to your grammar and spellings, as nothing more puts you out as an unprofessional than errors made in these areas.

6.)  Choose audiences that will help to attain your website’s goal:

Who are the major people you need to reach out to fulfill your goal? Make a list of audiences your business naturally engages, and then expand to people that your business would like to engage. Furthermore, choose your primary target audience, meaning prioritize one above others. When assessing your primary audience, consider the given questions:

–         How likely is it that your audience would always visit your website?

–         Who are your competitors that can attract your audience away from your site?

–         How much competition you could face to attract this audience?

–         Which audience is the most important for reaching your website’s goal?

After you’ve assessed all these questions, choose your audience that will best suit your website’s purpose and your business’s goals.

7.)  Carefully re-evaluate your services and customer profile:

The next step is to reassess all your products and services thoroughly in a fresh way. Ask yourself: which characteristics and advantages are most likely to interest new business? Which feature may be less suitable or discourage the audience? All these analyses will then lead to modifications and changes to your offered services and moreover, yield new and attractive businesses.

Besides this, you’ll also want to re-check your target audience regularly. Every 5 to 6 months or once a year, make sure you do some primary research and reassess your customer profile accordingly. Since the market place changes and shifts from time to time, your ideal customers may change with it.

Finally, that last step is to re-check your decision. Once you’ve figured out who your target audience is, make sure to consider the given questions:

–         Will the target audience benefit from my services in all way possible?

–         Will the audience see a need to use the services?

–         Can they really afford my services and products?

–         Is there enough audience who fit my product’s criteria?

–         Are they easily available and accessible for further communication?

In summary:

Ultimately, the key is to get as detailed information of your target audience as possible so that you can create a marketing campaign that is worth it and that speaks to the people you intend to reach. Once you know who all your target people, it becomes much easier to determine which source you can use to reach them, and what type of marketing message will create more interest in them. As a result, you can build a marketing campaign that is effective, useful, and targeted at the people you most want to reach out.

Hopefully, you are now equipped and ready to better characterize your true web audience and create content that is the best for the right audience. So, start identifying your target people, and make the most out of your efforts, money, and time.