One of the biggest challenges in marketing is gaining traction when you’re just starting out. How exactly do companies find their target audience? We’ll cut right to the chase; this process is mainly research and analytics-based. A ton of time and energy is invested in demographics and competitor research even before you initially establish your brand or prior to launching a new product that departs a little from your usual target audience. The second thing this article will delve into is how to hang on to your target audience.

The second piece of this is a little trickier as every audience is different. The larger your target demographic, the trickier it is. It’s much more difficult to appeal to 100 people than it is to pique and keep the interest of 5.

Without any further ado, let’s jump right into it!

This could be you! Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is the group of people you want to connect with via social media or advertising outreach. These individuals are most likely to buy or take interest in your brand, products, or services. A single target audience tends to share common characteristics like demographics and behaviors. For example, if you open a vintage store that sells everything from Worthington dresses to Chanel boots from 1982, your target audience might be mainly married women between 30-60 years of age, who have received higher education degrees, make between 60k-250k per year and spend between $50-$300 on clothing whenever they shop online.

How Do I Find My Brand’s or Product’s Target Audience?

1.) Who is currently buying your product? Understanding your current audience will help you attract them online. 

The best first step to figuring out your target audience is to look inward. At first, anyway. By doing some initial web analytics and social media research, you can determine who is interacting with your company on social, who is buying your product, who is following you, and who is subscribed to your newsletter. You’ll want to break your audience down into demographics such as age, language, spending power, education level, stage of life, household income, interests, challenges. We know that all of these different data points are pretty daunting, but there are programs in place to help you wade through all of this data.

2.) Market your products by benefits, not features.

When you create ad copy for how your product can address your target audience’s pain points, you are much more likely to start scoring sales.

3.) Perform competition research.

Know your competition inside and out. What is their target demographic? How are they marketing to them? What are their differentiators? These are all important details to keep in mind when you perform competition research. It will help you determine what might work for your own brand. Using Buzzsumo is a great way to snoop on the competition.

It pays to do your research! Photo by William Iven on Unsplash 

4.) What are your company’s differentiators? In other words, why would a customer pick your company over a competitor?

Let’s face it- social media is oversaturated with businesses jockeying for the attention of their target audiences, so standing out is more important than ever. How is your company different from your competition? Is this differentiator appealing to your target audience? If so, flaunt it!

5.) Put out a post-purchase survey

Surveys are great tools that will help you delve deeper into your target demographic. The people who purchase from you are exactly the types you want to focus your marketing strategy towards. You’ll want to get the information we mentioned in #1. We recommend framing it as a customer satisfaction survey to encourage participation.

6.) How do your target demographics interact with you? 

Next, we want to ensure that the content we’re creating will resonate with the parts of your target audience that live on certain social media sites. Here is a great breakdown of Facebook user demographics, so you will want to create content in a way that addresses their needs in a way they like to be communicated with. We’ll provide great articles to review if you’re looking for demographics for Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. You’re going to need to ensure that you’re creating content that piques the interest of the parts of your demographic using each platform. You can also use Google Analytics to discover this, too. Pro tip: Check under your referrals traffic!

We want that sweet, sweet non-sponsored social media promotion! Photo by Tanya Santos on Unsplash

7.) What’s the buzz on social? 

Get an idea for how people are talking about your brand online by searching for your company on social platforms and search engines. Compile posts and figure out what content you can create to really draw people in. It wouldn’t hurt to do a little direct communication marketing, either.

We hope that these insights on how to find your target audience has been helpful! At Promotion LA, we know this is a lot of work, so we’re here for you every step of the way. We’ve got a business analyst and an entire team of marketing professionals standing by to help you analyze data points and help you best reach your target demographic.

Ready to get started?