How to Identify the Right Target Audience for Your Brand – 5 Ways

Audiences have the power to either make or break your brand. Whether you are a conventional manufacturer or are providing a service or a web marketer, your focus should be to find the right target audience for your brand. It stands to lose out if you forget to conduct the basic research in this direction.  

Well, in the first place, how do you identify the correct target audience? In this article, we attempt to provide some pointers that will help in defining your target audience. This helps to understand the market landscape better and reduce the risk of your brand losing out against its competitors. 

Target audience is the name given to a group of consumers defined by their gender, location or income who would purchase your products or services. They are the ones who should view your ad campaigns. However, your target market is slightly different in that it consists of anyone interested in your products/services.  

As an example, the target audience for adventure games may be teenagers and the target audience for cosmetic products would be young females in urban locations. They are the groups of individuals on whom you want to focus your marketing efforts. It is impossible to craft a marketing strategy for your product/strategy without identifying your target audience.  

1: Conduct market research with due diligence 

The research should encompass all aspects of the market. Identifying the brand’s strengths and weaknesses together with the impending opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) is the best place to start at. 

Such a research would to the fore the following parameters:

These would help you to identify your correct target audience and position your business in the right spot.  

2: Understanding Purchase Path/ Pain Points 

When trying to understand your target audience, you should also attempt to know in detail the considerations that affect the purchase paths, and also the pain points they experience during the purchase journey.

For this, it would be helpful to answer questions as to how to provide solutions to a specific problem and what goals the target audience has. Answers to these questions will allow you to build personas and also add content that would address the problems of the audience. Personas are used to represent various users and this activity helps to understand the roles of the target audience who may use your products/services. 

Most problems that your audience faces would be during the different stages of the buying process. Special content and messages to the personas are likely to positively push them to the end of the sales funnel.  

The latest trends point to the fact that personalized brand marketing is gaining more ground and therefore understanding the buyer’s purchase journey becomes more relevant.  

3: Getting to know your customers 

One of the ways to determine your target audience is to get an in-depth understanding of your current audience in terms of preferences and demographics. You can gain this knowledge about your target audience by exploring a few avenues such as: 

Social media metrics and website analytics

You will get a fair idea as to who is visiting your website frequently, which page of your site they prefer to browse and how they navigate through your website. It is vital to get to know who is interacting with your social media accounts as well. 

It is useful to learn to use tools such as Facebook Insights and Google Analytics to get varied and extensive information about user activity on your sites and accounts.  

4: Using multi-segment marketing 

This is one of the methods that are still in vogue to churn out the right target audience for you. Multi-segment marketing works to gain customers from different market segments to buy the same product for the same use. It works by leveraging digital media content including social media, content writing, and PR.  

Different decision-makers at different points in the sales funnel would receive different messages which would eventually push the prospect to the end of the sales funnel. Ultimately, whereas some businesses can sell the same product to many different segments of audiences, others make different products that appeal to different groups.  

5: Do not start with an audience that does not appreciate your product 

Sometimes brands make a mistaken judgment and try to reach out to a broad audience right at the start. This may result in wasted efforts if you do not know your audience well. Instead, it pays to have a niche audience that loves your product. This is possible only after you identify the target audience.  

Niche marketing techniques start with very small numbers that can grow to huge ones later. In this type of brand marketing, your audience will start endorsing the brand and do quite a bit of the work that you have to do making things easier for you. It is a good learning experience and you can grow your brand the way you want to.  

Conclusion 

Though it is difficult and cumbersome to find out how to reach your target audience, once you reach out to them it becomes very beneficial to generating a better ROI for your brand. That’s what you want and, therefore, it is worth taking the trouble.