News & Insights

Get to Know Your Customer

As marketers or business owners, you’ve probably heard the term “Target Audience.” In all honesty, this term seems cold and technical when in reality that’s the exact opposite of the way you want to interact with your customers. Think of finding your target audience as getting to know your customer. It’s on you to know who they are, what they do, what their interests are and much more. So, let’s shake their hand, make our introductions and get to know our customers.

What is a Target Audience?

Essentially, a target audience is the ideal group of people who will buy the product or service your company is offering. For example, if you were selling kids’ backpacks, the audience that will connect most with your product and messaging will likely be adults, 35-45 years old, with children in school. This is a lot like building a brand persona, but instead of creating a fictious person to market to, you’re defining a general group of customers that your company does best with. The real difference between a brand persona and a target market is how specific you get. Target audiences are more general while brand personas can get hyper specific.

You might be wondering why finding your target market is important. Knowing helps in so many ways. Once you’ve found the best customers for your product/service, you can craft your messaging directly to them. Whether it’s a digital marketing strategy, social media marketing strategy or your marketing strategy plan overall, the message you craft now will be more efficient in creating the conversions you desire most.

How to Find Your Target Audience?

Your search should be analytically driven. Tools such as Google Analytics and social media metrics pages have key insights into who your audience is currently. They can give you a great starting point to hone in on the right audience. However, this is generally associated with your digital and social media presence. Depending on the type of business you run, there can be data associated with ecommerce sites such as Shopify that show the audience making the purchases. This information is most important in determining your target audience because sales matter most. The people buying your product most are the ones you should be marketing to.

These tools can give you all types of information like one’s age, gender, location, the industry they work in, their interests, income bracket, etc. There’s no end to the information you can find. You may need to buy some additional tools to get more specific, but it may be worth it.

Your answer isn’t going to reveal itself by just looking at these numbers, you need to analyze them to find the trend. Look over your data for a given time period. The best tactic is to align your search with a new marketing campaign. The numbers will show who that campaign is working best with and therefore give you the target audience.

It’s important to remember that your audience may change. Use the audience you find for as long as it works for your business. But as those numbers begin to slip, re-evaluate the data you collect and see if your customer base has shifted. It’s never a one-and-done thing, target audiences for a business are constantly changing. It could be a new campaign, a new product or as simple as a new season. Be smart and be aware of what is happening in your business.