You might be thinking – what’s the point of having a target audience when you could just target everyone? Is there really a point to narrowing in on your target market? What if you’re missing out on customers outside of your niche by niching down?

And these are reasonable questions for those that don’t understand the value of a target audience.

In this guide, I want to explain EVERYTHING there is to know about target audiences. What’s the point? What is a target market? And why should you care – for the sake of your business?

These are the questions I’m looking to answer. Let’s dive in deeper!

What is a Target Audience?

First, let’s answer the most critical question. A target audience is a specific group of consumers most likely to buy your product or service.

This is the group of people that should be seeing your advertising efforts. Why? Because they’re the ones that are buying your product/service!

what is a target audience? — And while some other people may still buy, not focusing on your target audience means leaving money on the table – or letting it slip through the cracks!

In short, a target audience helps you narrow in on diverse factors that your ideal client cares about.

By the time we’re done with this guide, you’ll be able to tell me everything about your ideal customer: How old are they? What do they do for a living? And most importantly, what are their pain points – and how does your product/service serve as a solution?

6 Major Benefits of Understanding Your Target Audience

Maybe you’re not quite sold yet on advertising to a more niche market than “everyone.” Understandably, there must be people outside your target demographic who will buy your product or service – right? Well, sure – but these are more considered “bonuses” than anything. Let’s look at the real benefits of understanding your target audience. I want to give you the full picture.

1. You Can Future Plan Your Whole Business

When you understand your target audience, you can plan out the future success of your entire business.
Think about it like this. If you understand your target audience, you know who your ideal client is.
Once you understand that, you can appeal to them during their peak pain points. You understand how to advertise to them.

2. Focus Efforts (and Money) on Groups Most Likely to Buy from You

Maximize your time and resources by focusing on the right audience. By advertising to everyone, you’re spreading yourself too thin! Thinking about and appealing to your ideal client helps hone in on the winners – AKA your customers.

By narrowing in on your target market, you also save money by not spending your advertising resources on people who have a lower chance of buying from you. If you try to sell to everyone, you’ll end up selling to no one.

3. You No Longer Have to Sell!

If you truly understand them, then you no longer have to sell when it comes to your target audience. You understand your target audience and their pain points. Once you angle that to your audience, the selling does itself.

If you have to convince someone to buy from you, then they're probably not your ideal client, or you're missing the messaging as to why your product/service is a solution for them. Either way, you don’t understand your target audience, and something is missing!

4. Make Your Brand Stand Out

Picture this: you’ve chosen a niche. You’ve found your target audience, and you know your ideal client. Instead of speaking to everyone, you target a focused group of people. And by doing that, you stand out from the crowd.

Your ideal client feels heard and noticed, and they can easily identify you out of the many brands out there. Understanding your target audience means you can make your brand stay top of mind!

5. Improve Customer Relations

“Everyone” is not your customer. Once you understand that part of marketing to a target audience, the rest becomes easy. You can then narrow in on your ideal customer and get to know as much about them as individuals as possible.

That, in turn, builds stronger relationships with those ideal clients. It’s a win-win for your brand and the customer!

6. Develop Deeper Customer Loyalty

When customers are happy, they develop a sense of loyalty to the brands they purchase from. A higher customer satisfaction rate helps to deepen customer loyalty. In fact, 80% of consumers say they’re more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized interactions.

The only way to personalize your interactions accurately is by finding the lookalike audience that counts! Whether doing that with your Instagram target audience, Facebook target audience, or other social media marketing platform, you’ll develop deeper customer loyalty by honing in on the right people.

What’s the Difference Between a Target Market and Target Audience?

Here’s the part that gets somewhat tricky– both terms refer to a group of

people that are interested in your services or products. However, a target market is a broader group of people. They’re everyone you think that’ll be interested in your brand. Meanwhile, a target audience is a specific segment of that broader market where you can focus on individual marketing campaigns.

Understanding your target market and your target audience are two keys to your business’ success. Being able to utilize both means you’re never marketing to someone that simply won’t be interested in your products/services.

11 Ways to Identify Your Target Audience

This section is dedicated to finding that ideal client. The following steps should help you realize your target audience.

1. Analyze Your Customer Base

If you’re not a freshly new business, you already have customers who’ve purchased your product or service. One of the best ways to hone in on your target audience is to look at those customers who are already buying. Where do they live – what are their interests? How old are they, and what do they do for a living?

2. Interview Your Customers – ASK!

A great way to analyze your customer base is through engaging on social media or even distributing a customer survey. You don’t have to do a formal interview to get the point across. Get to know your customers – ask them questions! Figure out what their pain points are.

Then, figure out how your product or service could resolve those pain points. The more answers you get, the more you’ll be able to understand why your customers do what they do. From there, selling them a service or product is a breeze.

3. Analyze Competitors

There are two parts to this one. First, you must discover who your top competitors are. Next, you must analyze those competitors. While it’s a simple two-step solution, the analysis is essential.

What are your competitors doing right? Or, better – what are they doing wrong that you could do *better*? How could you improve upon what they’re already doing? Then, dig in even deeper. Who are your competitors targeting? Which of their campaigns are successful and which appear to fall flat? Most importantly – how much do they sell?

4. Create Personas

This is where you get as specific as possible. It’s time to build personas that are your mock buyers. It’s a great way to drill down into specific segments that make up your target audience. And having multiple personas is realistic for most brands.

Different target markets may be a part of your target audience. Personas are then created based on what data you’ve gathered so far. That includes any digital engagements you’ve had, like with social media marketing, surveys, and other types of data.

Maybe a group of your buyers has a specific hobby, while others might have a favorite TV show in common. Marketers, especially social media marketers, should develop between 3 and 5 personas. From there, you can use lookalike audience marketing to narrow in on the best-selling audience.

5. Define Who ISN’T Your Target Audience

There are plenty of people who will be very close to your target demographic. Unfortunately, these people are unlikely to ever act on buying. You must build your target audience definition to be exact to get the most out of your resources.

Is your target women, or is it women between 18 and 34? Is it women between 18 and 34, or between 20 and 40? These may seem like too-specific details. On the contrary, you’ll avoid devoting ad dollars to segments that won’t yield returns. Talk about a win!

6. Dive Into Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic, AND Behavioral

Later in this guide, we’ll touch on the different types of target audiences. It’s important to combine these types and see what they have in common to truly find your ideal client. The geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral reasons your customers have for purchasing your product or service are all vital!

7. Use Google Analytics

There’s a lot of valuable data you can gather with Google Analytics. You can leverage this information to determine key insights. These insights might include what type of content your customers are engaging with or what channels they’re coming through.

What are your perfect customers connecting with the most? Google Analytics allows you to make more data-driven decisions, especially during the social media marketing planning process.

8. Revise, Revise, REVISE

And never stop! Continuously revise as you interact with more customers and gather more data. You’ll be surprised at how increasingly accurate your understanding of your target customer will be. As a result, you must constantly optimize and hone in on the perfect personas for your business. That’ll help you achieve the best results!

9. Audit Constantly

Just as consistently as you’ll revise, you’ll need to audit your shop, products, or services. It never hurts to never stop improving!

10. Understand Your Target Audience Will Change

Over time, just as your brand might evolve and get little “refreshes,” so can your target audience. And that’s okay! It means it’s time to relearn and know that your old marketing hacks may have to be adjusted. This new audience may need to be marketed to differently. Understanding that is key to keeping up with your target audience in an evergreen way.

11. Look at Social Media Analytics

Your Facebook target audience, Instagram target audience, and other social media target customers can give you some major clues as to your overall audience. Look at your social media analytics (as well as your competitors, if you can snag them) to uncover more about your ideal customer.

5 Types of Target Audiences

Now that you know that a target audience is a group identified for their focus, I can dig in deeper.

There are varying types of audiences, and understanding them will help you hone in on your target audience. Let’s look at the main types of audiences together.

1. Locational

Maybe you’re Baton Rouge Social Media Company that local residents can resonate with. Baton Rouge-based brands like to highlight where they’re from. Perhaps your high-point buyers are in New Orleans or a strip mall in Lafayette.

Locational audiences can be as simple as providing info about a festival to the right group of people. However, locational audiences can still benefit from narrowing in further on the types of target audiences I have below.

Also known as a “geographic” audience type, geographics can include things like:

Countries
Communities
Climate
Size
Region
City
Rural, suburban, and urban areas

2. Demographics

Perhaps your brand wants to appeal to a certain age group or another type of demographic. Demographics such as a commercial or film intended to appeal to a particular group is another type of target audience.

Demographics can include things like:

Age
Race
Gender
Marital status
Religion
Income level
Education level
Language spoken
Occupation
And more

Think about it like this. Someone that’s 18 years old, single, and in college rather than has an occupation will behave differently than someone who’s 36 years old, married, and has a solid occupation. These two types of people will purchase differently from each other and are unlikely to buy the same product or service for the same reason.

3. Behavior

Customers experience a variety of behaviors that influence their purchasing intent. Media consumption, mobile phone use, social media use, purchasing styles, habits, and hobbies can all play a role. It’s up to you to decide how to segment target audience user profiles for your business’ greatest benefit.

4. Psychographics

Next, we get into the psychological reasons for purchasing a product. This goes deeper than religion, all the way down to values and core beliefs. Budget, pain points, attitudes, social and cultural norms, activities, and typical roles all play a factor here.For example, how someone wants to be perceived by others can be a HUGE driver for purchases.

5. Lifestyle

Your lifestyle is how you spend your time. This varies from the others in that someone’s lifestyle may lead them to a product or service that wouldn’t otherwise be introduced to them. For example, maybe you’re targeting people who have a long commute to work.

To get in deeper, maybe you want to target them because they want to use their time to improve on a certain set of skills, and you provide that learning to them.

Combining Types of Target Audiences

With these types combined, you have your ideal client! I’m so happy we’ve made it this far. But what do you do now that you have your ideal customer? You’ve compiled your personas – now what?

4 Market Research Tools for Conducting Audience Research

HubSpot’s Make My Persona

The Make My Persona tool from HubSpot allows you to create a buyer persona for your new potential product. In the tool, you can define who might benefit the most from your products, which is key to marketing effectively.

The persona generator helps empower businesses to make a difference in how they design campaigns. As a template, you can use it for every campaign!

Statista

Another useful online platform is Statista, which specializes in market and consumer data. They offer market insights, consumer insights, and company insights. You can use the platform to find valuable statistics, data reports, and more!

SurveyMonkey

Known as the world’s most popular free online survey tool, SurveyMonkey is great for getting surveys started. Engage with your audience and get an idea of what they like the most with honest feedback through a survey site like SurveyMonkey.

Note: there are other survey sites! You’re not limited to just one, the one I recommend is merely the one that’s most well-known.

Census Bureau Website

Did you know that the US Census Bureau offers a free resource for searching through census data? It’s invaluable! You can filter by location, year, income, and/or age. Using some of its shortcuts, you can get visualizations of potential target markets all across the country.

The Census Bureau Business and Economy data tool lets you target premade tables, which is helpful depending on your industry.

Or, if you know the NAICS code for your business, you can access the Tables tool and click Filter on the sidebar. Then, search for your industry. From there, you can easily find your target industry and where it’s most popular. Alternatively, you might discover where the market has been oversaturated.

Shining with Your Target Market

Now, I want to teach you ways to truly shine with your ideal client. The goal, of course, is to build a lasting connection. That connection will keep customers coming back, spark word-of-mouth advertisements, and create a lasting impression for your brand.

Be Human

First and foremost, this one might seem a bit too simple, but it does need to be said. Don’t underestimate the power of being human and vulnerable with your customers. People crave human connection and feeling emotion.

Show emotion when you speak with your customers, and they’ll feel it. It adds an extra touch you can’t get everywhere, which ultimately leaves a lasting impression to them.

Communicate

Try for one-on-one communication as often as possible. Whether that means engaging with them individually on social media or in person, or both, try out different methods to see what works best. Communication is key, and genuine engagement keeps customers coming back!

Ask Questions

Part of communication is finding out more about your client and how you can help them. And how do you do that? Ask questions! Targeted questions that are engaging will have the multi-faceted benefit of helping to bring the customer back.

Give Them Something Unique

Finally, discover your unique value proposition and offer it to your ideal client. Find a clear, succinct statement that tells your potential customers how they’ll benefit from your product or services.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there’s a lot to know about your target audience. In fact, you can narrow in on exactly who your ideal customer is – with the right research ahead of time.

If you put your all into finding your target market, you’ll be providing your product or service to them in no time. That means you can skip the selling and go straight to the source! Should you find yourself with more questions about Social Media Marketing in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, or Lafayette, let’s connect! We’d love to help.

Who is Your Target Audience? 🤗 [Narrowing in on Your Ideal Client/Customer]