Marketing and business are almost impossible if you don't know your audience. First of all, you need to know who you are trying to reach before you can do anything business or marketing.
It will not happen on a platter of gold; you need to find a message that resonates with them to trust you and your idea.
In this guide, we'll walk you through how to know your audience, but first, let's consider why it's important to know your audience.
Why is it important to know your audience?
As often said by marketers, the money you're looking for is in the hands/pocket of someone somewhere. If you reach these people and you're able to pitch to them, streamlining your message to their pain point so that it resonates with them.
Boom, you have it!
You'll sell, render or do any business that solves their problems if you know your audience. Your messages will be clear and straight to the point that they will connect you to the people who matter to your business growth and success.
That said, you can also build your audience by considering the results you'll get if you know your target audience.
The results of knowing your target audience
No matter your position or duty in your business, knowing your target audience is as crucial as the business itself. The following are the results you'll get if you know your target audience:
- You'll build a brand and create a strong persona around your business
- Increased sales of your products and services
- Good return on investment for your marketing campaign
- Your messages will resonate with your audience and clear off time wasters
- Build better and long-lasting relationships for more sales and business deals
- You'll always have continuous sales of your product or service so long that your communication with them is intact
- Your business will experience an upward trend in financial growth and otherwise
- There'll be a possibility of your business transforming into a transgenerational brand
The list is enormous, but first, let's consider how you can turn audience insights into detailed customer personas
Turn Audience Insights into Detailed Customer Personas
Turning audience insight into detailed customer personas will require compiling your audience data like age, gender, location, hobbies, language, spending power and patterns, interests, challenges, stages of life, profession, education, marital status, decision maker, and supporter.
After that, you have to identify your customer pain points or goals.
You'll know where you can render help with clearly stated goals and pain points.
As soon as you discover how you can help, you'll then be able to create your customer personas with your gathered audience insights.
Take, for instance, a customer persona for Randler Michelle, a 27 years old Sales Executive whose insight you can curate through SurveyMonkey.
Name: Randler Michelle
Gender: Female
Age: 27
Education: Bachelors in Marketing
Occupation: Sales Executive
Marital Status: Single
Location: Miami
Description: Randler Michelle is a female in her late 20s who has been a sales executive for a profitable Agency for more than five years. She's single and looking forward to a great marriage, lives in Miami, enjoys taking an annual vacation, and likes to make her local recipes. Michelle has a strong network of marketing professionals and enjoys attending conferences to meet new people. She's okay with brands she loves and trusts.
This information makes creating a marketing plan for your brand easy since you know where she lives, her occupation, and her marital status.
How do I identify my target audience?
Identifying your target audience requires in-depth research, analysis, and transcribing data from customers' engagement, like your current buyers, the purchasing trends, and more. If you want to identify your target audience and build brand awareness in a quick and faster way, the following step should give you a hint:
1. Target Market Research
Targeted market research could help you know your audience in business and tailor content that resonates with them through:
Competitors Reviews:
You can know your audience through competitor reviews by comparing data based on sales channels, the people buying their products/services, and the procedure they're engaging. If this sounds too hard, polls or directly asking your audience will deliver the best result.
Polls/Asking Your Audience Directly:
Polls or directly asking your audience is a faster way to know your audience in your business. It works perfectly on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media channels. To do this, create a post with relevant questions attached, and at the end, ask questions using a poll with options to choose from and give their views.
Research Tools:
There are numerous tools available today that allow you to know your audience. A heavily underrated one is Google trends; it enables you to see the level of interest in a particular product or service.
The tool helps to show how it fluctuates over time across regions. Another free research tool is SurveyMonkey, with more robust features and templates to guide you for quicker results. If you want to opt for paid research tools, YouGov and Demographic Pro could offer a better option for you.
2. Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics Insights
Using Google Analytics insight will help identify site visit analytics like bounce rates, the source of the target audience, the keywords that rank your site, and the content they're engaging with most.
These data will help you in your marketing and media buying process and foster decision-making.
3. Start with your current customers (if possible)
A quicker way to know your audience is to start with the current customers that buy your products or services. Look out for what interests them, where they live, and how old they are. And, of course, the perfect place to know this is through social media and online surveys/polls.
4. Facebook Advertising Tools: Analyze your social media platform insights
Facebook advertising tools are a game changer when it comes to knowing your audience in your business. The ads insight allows you to target various demographic and interests since the algorithms work perfectly with an audience consuming similar content.
Data from this method will help create different ads that will resonate with the audience and ultimately help you with your b2b lead generation strategies. If you're doing this, you should consider the desired outcomes, not the features.
5. Think of the outcomes they want, not the features
Thinking of the outcomes they want and not the features would allow you to engage and know your audience and tailor content that resonates with their needs/challenges. By this, you talk about the results they'll get if they engage with your products or services.
For instance, your link-building services would allow your prospect to gain first/higher page ranking, ultimately leading to more organic site visits and sales.
6. Demographics
If you follow all other methods and neglect demographic, you'll miss a lot in knowing your audience. Demographics like gender, age, education, employment, and income level would help you foster your decision-making for ads budget and spending.
Knowing your demographic is not enough to know your audience; collecting the demographic data of your target audience help streamline and tailor your content to help them in their challenges.
7. Collect demographic data on your target audience
Collecting the demographic data of your target audience, like age, gender, education, employment, place of residence, and income level, can help you know what they can afford, like, and most importantly, what they would likely spend their money on.
Demographic data can produce amazing results if you tie them to a niche.
8. Go niche
If you want to identify your target audience faster, going niche would help you achieve that easily. For instance, if you do SEOs, you shouldn't collect content writing jobs and link-building services at once if you don't have a team.
Doing that would drain you off and will eventually lead to losing customers that would have given you more jobs if you niche down. You can also take it further by setting up conversion tracking in your Google Analytics.
9. Take it a step further and set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics
Another remarkable way to know your audience is by setting up conversion tracking in your Google Analytics. It allows you to create and track the number of site visits and those that took action on your site.
There are usually three conversions as it relates to Google Analytics GA4:
- Predefined conversion
- Mark X event as a conversion
- Create an event typically mark it as a conversion
You can hire a GA4 freelancer on legiit that would help you set up your Google Analytics for your site without robbing a bank.
10. Psychographics
If you can understand the consumer behavior of your audience, you'll do well in delivering content that resonates with them and gain their trust. A psychographics study of your audience's activities, interests, and opinions will immensely produce a good ROI and easily foster your growth amid competitors.
For instance, the legiit platform is barely four years or so, and the monthly visit of the site is around 300k, according to a similar web insight. Also, according to the CEO, it has recorded much growth because it focuses on knowing its audience's activities and interests and, simultaneously, listening to its prospects' opinions.
11. SEO Tools and Keyword Research Tools
SEO and keyword research tools are other ways you can identify your audience and connect with them. Tools like Semrush, Ubbersuggest, MOZ, and Google Keyword Planner are a few SEO and keyword research tools that help you identify your prospects.
With these tools, you can research audience page visits, website keywords, and PPC.
12. Look for trends in online customer feedback
Your website or blog, Trustpilot, and amazon are great places to find product reviews or customer feedback. If you want to know your audience faster, looking up trends in online customer feedback would help you big time.
If you can check up on comments on forums, social media posts, and community pages, you will learn about what your audience like, where they hang out, and where and how they seek support for their challenges.
13. Send out customer surveys
Engaging in a customer survey for your brand allows you to know and reach your audience faster. A detailed survey report will show the customer buying power, interests, and opinion on your products or services.
For instance, if you want to survey a brand to know the opinion and thought of people toward it, using SurveyMonkey could help you discover amazing results. With more than 175 million respondents around the globe, you're sure of getting your results in minutes.
14. Online conversations
Online conversations from live chat, Facebook groups, forums, comment sections, and popular online marketplace are a great way to know what your audience is seeking a solution for.
You can do this yourself or get a team to help you out. The way this works is that you can post specific streamlined questions about your niche, then ask what's their opinion.
You can also go through the comment section of a group you're part of, read through the comments, and discover a bunch of information you can use for marketing or business purposes.
It doesn't end there; your site live chat is another avenue to know your audience. Usually, your prospect would visit your site; if they can't find what they want, a live chat with you will reveal their opinion, thoughts, and motivation toward your brand.
15. Interviews with real people that are your target market
An extensive interview with real people that are your target market will allow you to get insight into their thoughts. This method is purely qualitative since it seeks these individuals' opinions, ideas, and motivations.
As the interview is qualitative, your question should be able to reveal the respondent's opinion, motivation, personality traits, and buying preference.
Ensure to allow the respondents to air their views while you listen. A great way to get the interview word for word is by asking permission to record them while they speak.
If you honestly listen to their deepest thoughts, you'll have enough information to know your target audience in your business.
Duh!!! You've discovered several ways to know your audience, and you may ask how I can know if my site attracts the right audience? are you ready to find out?
Let's dive on.
How can I determine if my website attracts the right audience?
Typically, your goal is to attract the right audience or clients to your site. So, to know if your site attracts the right audience, a few things/indicators give such hints.
1. Your website content is relevant and connects to your target audience.
No blah about this. Your articles, blog posts, and website content appeal to their emotions and needs. If you're wondering how to get 100% unique content free from fluff, legiit got you covered with their expert SEO content writer.
2. The style and tone of your website appeal to your target audience.
The colors and fonts on your site appeal to your audience. Also, the responsiveness and the layout speak well of your brand.
3. The language on your website appeals to your target audience.
If your site's language is tailored to appeal to your audience, they will stick and eventually become your lifetime buyer. Using the right words and language they understand brings them to ask for more.
Lastly, your site traffic will increase, leading to increased conversion and sales.
Final Thoughts
Ideally, knowing your audience will require you to pay careful attention to every piece of information and report from brands and marketing campaigns.
You can know your audience via organic and paid means. Free tools like Google Analytics and Google trends can get you started, but if you want more advanced tools, opting for Semrush, MOZ, Demographic Pro, YouGov, and a bunch of others could help.
By all means, stick to the one that works for you and never stop learning until you reach the zenith in your field.
Kudos to you; thanks for reading this far. If you want content like this, don't hesitate to reach me via legiit chat.
Thank you
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