A good content marketing strategy is one that is addressed at a certain set of people instead of a generic audience. It is one that speaks to people with a solid foundation of data on who they are, what their challenges look like and other demographics. This is where the search on ‘how to find your target audience’ begins for most.  

Defining a target audience is not about constraining yourself,  but giving your marketing efforts a direction targeted towards people who’re more likely to respond to your campaigns. 

In this blog, we’re going to cover some important aspects of how to find your target audience, starting with: 

• What is a target audience?
• Different ways to segment your audience
• How to find your target audience?
• 5 tools you can use to find your target audience

What is a target audience?

Target audience is defined as a set of people you want to focus on with your marketing activities. These are people you believe are more likely to become paying customers for your business either immediately, or in the future.

Having a defined set of people will help you refine a marketing strategy to focus all efforts towards things that are more likely to generate a response, and hence, ROI. Defining a target audience typically includes looking into data points such as the following, but not restricted to:

• Demographics
• Pain points
• Industry
• Education
• Income

Target Market vs Target Audience

You might take the target market synonymously with the target audience, but they differ. The target market is an entire set of people you want to target as a business. Whereas the target audience is much narrower, it’s a small group of individuals among your target market that are more likely to convert on what you have to offer.

For example, you’ve got project management software with various functionalities. But one of those features strictly focuses on the founders of the company. So different companies might be your target market, but founders are one of your target audiences.

Different ways to segment your target audience

According to the IAB taxonomy, we can sort the target audience types into three major categories.

• Demography

Demography includes age, education, income, gender, and geographic location. You can use the demographic data to segment your audience as per the mentioned criteria.

For example, you’ve created an app that educates teenagers about personal finance. So you can segment your audience based on age between 13-19 and prime location.

• Purchase intention

This data is highly crucial for every business. You need to segment the audience into groups who have recently purchased a similar product/ service or are looking for one. 

For example, a customer success director wants to invest in a customer success software, but they wish to know more about it. They want to see each option and how it can help the company convert more customers or get more renewals. In this case, their purchase intention could be to ‘reduce customer success costs’. 

• Interests

Interest covers all about the topics your target audience wants to know more about. It can be data, AI, crypto, marketing, or anything trending and beneficial simultaneously, based on the industry you are in.

Having this data helps you target them with better offers, and also identify collaborations that can help you reach them faster.

How to find your target audience?

• Learn more about customers with Google analytics

Google Analytics is the most underrated tool in the marketing world. It is the right tool to understand your audience’s demographics and interests as well other than just tracking your traffic and bounce rate.

Demographics and interests are the foundation of building a target audience. Google Analytics allows you to see the website insights divided into different sections such as location, gender, and age.

• Draft a reader persona

Personas are fictional characters who align with your potential audience for the content. And with reader personas, you’ll never forget who you’re writing for. Reader personas are incredibly identical with the buyer persona.

Going through this step is crucial for you because you don’t want to post anything that’s not relevant to your audience. For example, your product is about data or metrics, and your readers want to learn more about the same – but you post blogs on how to do content marketing.

This is irrelevant because your audience wants to know how they can leverage data to level up their businesses and not about content marketing.

• Analyze social media analytics

Social media is the best place to fetch data when you want to know who’s talking about you and what. You need to think about which type of posts have generated the most engagement and reach for your business – and also your competitors.

Was it a meme? A live session with an expert? A collaboration with an influencer?

Now every social media channel is different. This means the way your audience reacts to a topic on one platform, may vary from the other and their chosen content format could be different too. 

The only way to get through this is to keep a tab on important marketing analytics across all the platforms. For example, Instagram is more crowded with people aged between 15 and 25, while anyone above 30 might enjoy scrolling through Facebook feeds.

You can either choose to collect data from each platform and then consolidate the insights or make use of social listening to identify your target audience on each, using tools like Radarr. 

• Keep a tab on Facebook insights

Even though Facebook is now an old platform, it is a golden tool for target audience analysis. It gives you a distinct set of insights that go hand in hand with Google analytics. And you get crucial and hyper-focused information that will help you spot the right target audience for you.

With the People tab on the Insights dashboard, you can easily spot your visitors’ precise location, demographics such as age and interests. You can learn more about it here.

• Check your website performance

Your website is the first introductory session for your target audience. So you need to dig up on what interests them, which will help you attract the right set of audience.

To get the most out of it, monitor your website’s best and worst-performing content formats.

By keeping a tab on these metrics, you can figure out what landing pages or blog posts are sparking interest. You can do this with the help of Google Search Console > Search Results > Queries and Pages. This will also give you insights on the keywords/ interest topics that your audience comes looking for.

You can then focus on improving the content that your audience is the most interested in – be it by refreshing it with new keywords, updating it with new information or adding more call to actions to it. 

• Engage on social media

Your social media page is the club for your audience, and you need to engage with them there as well. When you create the buyer persona, your social media followers are what you should look into.

You can post and ask your followers what they want to see from you? Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have interactive stickers and stories that allow your followers to contact you quickly.

Conclusion

Having a distinct set of target audiences helps you give a personalized push to your marketing efforts. 

Leverage social media, website, and Google analytics to know your target audience. At Contensify, we leverage every possible platform to build your ideal set of target users. 

Want to explore how we do it? Reach out to us today.