Your audience is the most important feature of your marketing. Without an audience, you cannot market to them. But how do you identify your target market? Let’s start with the basics.

What is a target audience?

A target market is the audience that you want to promote to. They can be the users that interact best with your products, or audiences that you aim to gain more of as customers. You can figure this out by understanding the purpose of your products, be it selling a sink for the purpose of kitchen functioning. With this identified, you can start picking out people that may be interested in your product, for example; new home owners or those into DIY.

How can you get data on your audience?

Audience data can be found in a number of places. The best location is to look in the Analytics section of your marketing platform. Facebook uses Audience Insights and for AdWords, the best platform is Google Analytics.
Let’s take Google Analytics. When in Analytics, you can navigate to Audience. Here you can find data on User Demographics, user Location, Gender, Interests and much more. This data can then be compared to site behaviour or transactions made. This will give you a good idea on who are your target audience.

Looking at your Competition

Your competitors, those dreaded enemies that battle for your ad space and bid over your keywords. But, when finding your target audiences, they can have their uses!
Reviewing your competitor’s strategy can be a great way to find your target audience. You can look at their customer interactions on social media, their product pricing and their marketing channels. This gives you an insight on the types of people they may be attracting or targeting.

What to do with your target audience?

So, you’ve got your target audience figured out- but what do you do with it now? This information can begin to form the basis of your marketing campaigns, ensuring you are reaching the best users.
With Google AdWords, you can target your ads to a specific audience, focussing on their location or when they will be using their device. On Facebook, ads can be targeted to users based on their demographics or interests.

Do’s and Don’ts

Do segment audience data to find the best performing for your business goals.
Do make your target audience specific. Fine details should be clear to gain the reach the best users.
Do have multiple target audiences for the different products you offer.
Don’t ignore audience data, because you think you know your customers!
Don’t limit your marketing to one channel only. Use a range of marketing channels from PPC, SEO and traditional forms.

Having a clear target market will make or break your marketing.