Learn How to Begin Identifying Your Target Audience

This article examines how to go about identifying your target audience by using your existing resources.

Gaining a better understanding of who your target audience is will enable you to create a more effective marketing plan; tailored to the needs and motivations of a specific group which will, in turn, help you ratify your existing customer base and create new leads.

It’s all well and good to have quality products and access to the right marketing resources, but without a well-defined idea about who your audience is, your business is unlikely to get too far.

Step 1: Look at your initial business plan

To understand what types of people would want to buy your products and services, it pays to revisit your business plan and look at your core goals, values, and what makes your business unique. From here, think about what kind of person, demographic and situation would benefit from what you offer.

Step 2: Do thorough market research

The next step is to back up this basic understanding of who needs your products and services with more information about who they are likely to be.

There is plenty of secondary research available online which looks into consumer habits and demographics on an industry level, and this can be a good starting point, but to get a really clear idea of who is interested in what you’re selling, digital platforms can often be the most helpful tools.

Two of the most commonly used digital tools for data-driven marketing are Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

Google Analytics can be used to see the behaviour of traffic on your site as well as details like their location, the type of technology they are using to access your site, and where your converted traffic is coming from.

Facebook Insights can be used to see your audience demographics like age, gender, city and language.

Step 3: Create a customer profile, AKA, persona

A customer profile, also known as a persona, paints a detailed picture of who your typical customer is and includes not only their demographics like gender, age, location, ethnicity, income, and marital status but also psychographic information like how they think, what they value in terms of politics and lifestyle, as well as behavioural patterns.

It’s also useful to understand how your customer shops and what media platforms they most frequently use.

A comprehensive marketing plan will typically have a strategy for 3 to 4 unique customer personas.

Next steps…

Direct Mail Solutions is an established mail house offering specialised data solutions to help you communicate with your target demographic.