Finding Your Target Audience: What You Need to Know

 This post is contributed and contains links.

Image credit

Over 60% of businesses don't know their target audience. Not knowing who your target audience is can put you at a severe disadvantage in many ways. Not only will you lose sales, but you will also be wasting your money casting your marketing net wide to see who you can reach.

But what exactly is meant by the target audience? Your target audience is who your product or service is aimed at. Identifying this audience and their pain points can help you improve what you do and ensure your business succeeds. But how do you find them?

Know Your Product

Before you start trying to find your target audience, you need to know exactly what your product or service is. This isn't from a business point of view but more from a customer point of view. What does it do for the customer, how does it help them, and what is it about your product or service that entices them to buy or not buy if this is the case? Put yourself in their shoes to get a more in-depth understanding of what you are selling.

Know Your Goals

You need to know what your goals are with your product. Are you happy with your customer base? Do you want to branch out to other market sectors, or can you sustain your company where you are? Knowing precisely what you want from your business, where you want it to go, and your possibilities regarding expansion and development can assist you in breaking down your current audience and finding your future audience. Let's say you are in the energy market and want to branch out to reach low to middle-income families with your services to expand what you do. You could use a community solar lmi platform to help you identify your target customer and assist in directing them from traditional energy sources of solar energy to help them reduce their bills.

Conduct Market Research

Once you have pinned down your product and understand it better, you can see your path going forward. From here, you can conduct market research to help you better understand what the customer wants, what their buying habits are like, and what other options are available for them in the market. You can use focus groups, surveys, ask for feedback, and more to help you ascertain the general feeling towards what you are selling and what drives a customer to make a purchase.

Know Your Customer

You need to get to know the customers you already have so you can build a profile of them and target the right audience. Who is already buying from you? What are their pain points? What do they like about your product or service, and have they left any feedback?

Then you can ask yourself questions such as, do you want to continue targeting these customers? Can you expand on what you do? Is there a possibility you can keep selling the same item over and over? Getting inside your buyer's heads will allow you to determine the best course of action for you and help you to find the right audience to sell to.

Use Social Listening

When it comes to finding your target audience, social listening tools can help you to find instances of where people mentioned products you sell, your competitors, and similar items. From here, you can gauge interest in what you do, what people are looking for, their thoughts on pricing, what they are willing to pay, and how they find it helpful. While it might not be your company specifically, finding people buying similar items can enable you to find a wider audience of buyers who are already interested in or need a gentle push to buy what you are selling.

Tailor Your Marketing

Digital marketing allows businesses to deliver a more personalized and targeted marketing approach. Once you have identified your target audience, you can use the data to help you target them more specifically. Consumers respond more to a personal approach, and if you can segment your marketing to hone on this, you can deliver a stronger message and get more results than a broad campaign with no intended target or idea of who you need to be marketing to. From targeted social media ads to using radio advertisements if your ideal customer is a motorist and is more likely to turn the radio on during their commute or targeting younger clientele with their fyp (for you page) on Tiktok, you need to know where to find them for greater success.

Your marketing campaign and business as a whole won't be as successful as they can be if you don't know your target audience and have not identified your ideal customer. By using the techniques in this post, you can find out exactly who they are before you start targeting them for a more significant ROI.