The purchasing process starts with the right target.  So every entrepreneur and marketer must know the audience they are going to target. For example, imagine you are selling baby shoes, and your ads are near kindergartens, your sales skyrocket: this is an example of proper targeting. Hence, if you have conducted thorough studies of your target audience, you are more than aware of their habits, whereabouts, and decision-making triggers. This is going to make your business thrive. 

Let’s get deeper into the topic and explore practical ways of how to find your target audience.

First, by saying your target audience, we refer to the group of people likely to purchase your service or product. To find out this group of people, you should have all the details about your product and service specificity.

We have 5 tips for you, to make it easier for you to find and target the desired audience for your business.

Tip 1: Do your target market analysis

I mean not only external market research but also the research within your company and team. To do the external market research effectively, better use the SWOT framework to find your internal situation and external factors affecting your operations. 

It is better to imagine that the target audience is singular; that will make your job easier. Sometimes marketers generalize and create a fictional character for the target audience. It is a useful tactic to personify the audience and treat as a single person. Here, we call it a buyer persona who has all the desirable characteristics of the ideal customer for our business. Your research will help you recognize: 

• Where is my target audience located?
• How old is my target audience? (can be a range, e.g., 18-25 ) 
• What are the gender, occupation, and marital status? 
• Which industry are they working in?
• How are the economic situation in the area and the industry?
• What are the pain points of my audience?
• What are their buying habits?
• How much income do they have? 

This list of questions will guide you to the perfect solution and packaging (both physical and digital, meaning design and presentation) of your product and service, which will lead you to successful deals. 

If you hire the right IT people, they will set up all the technology that will help visualize the market research data. So, see the big picture and understand it better with the technology at hand.

So far, we have gone over the external market research, but there are some cases when you already have a customer base. Here you better interact with the front desk, customer-facing teams, like sales or support, who are already in touch with the customers. They are a significant source of information as they have already experienced the communication style, habits and have tackled their problems. 

Tip 2. Define problems and the target customer’s journey

Now that you have all the data from your market research, you can create a visual path called a customer’s journey. Imagine your target audience is crossing its way towards the solutions you have for their problem. That is the journey, and you need to visualize and pave their way to you. 

The journey is not a direct path, but most often, it has three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. At any point on the journey, your target audience is communicating with your brand. So it is essential to direct them towards the decision stage with relevant calls to action.

You can already craft the buyer persona profile at this step, including all the pain points they encounter during their journey. Then, as you have the persona at hand, you can organize and share the relevant content by addressing any pain points.

Why is it essential to create buyer personas? First, it will help you speak to the target audience, having in mind their problems, and your solutions are more likely to reach them. 

The customer’s journey is like the journey you pass when performing technical hiring. First, you visualize the target employee and guide them towards the vacancy you have at your company. Here you have your future employee as your target audience, and you target your activities and critical messages on their journey.

Visualization is critical here; try drawing or using digital maps like wireframing techniques for design to see the path and tackle each step individually. You can use this journey when creating your content creation strategy, as each piece of content will respond to the potential questions your target audience will have.

Tip 3. Interact with your existing customers

The chances are high that your target audience will share a lot of characteristics with your existing customers, so it will be efficient to interview and interact with your customers. This will help you use the method of deductive reasoning to craft a more accurate buyer persona profile. 

A very effective way of conducting secondary market research is by interviewing your customers with relevant and revealing questions. For example, you can ask what made them choose you, which part of your service or product they like the most. Here, you automatically figure out your competitive advantage or find out any pitfalls that will hinder your customers from buying from you. 

Besides one-on-one meeting interviews with your customer, you can use your website and social media analytics to retrieve statements and have a bigger picture. For example, social media interactions of your customers say a lot about their likes and dislikes, their behavior, and preferences.  

Website analytics results, such as Google Analytics reports or heatmap recordings, will also give you valuable insights into your target audience’s behavior. These give you extensive data about the user experience and experience maps. 

If you are in the b2b sector, you are more likely to look for target brands who are the brands that correspond to the ideal customer of your product. Target brands are defined by their size, revenue and pain points. 

Tip 4: Use empathy mapping 

Empathy mapping is a sustainably helpful technique for doing market research and understanding your potential buyers. Think of it as a quadrant that shows how your target audience behaves and influences their way of thinking. Therefore, you are handling 6 aspects of your target audience. Then you define what they hear, think and feel, see, say, and do. Each of these aspects helps you thoroughly understand and retrieve insights from their behavior. For a more effective process, you can gather with your team and fill in all the map sections. Then, use sticky notes and write your answers to questions like: 

What do they see, say, hear etc.
This is an incredible technique to identify all pain points that you could have missed before. 

Tip 5. Avoid aiming at broad target audiences  

Broad and vague targets will bring your business nowhere. This is an outdated technique from traditional marketing.  It is like random billboards used to be placed somewhere on a busy street.  They are appealing to a little to no segment of passersby. So, even if your product has a considerably broad target market, try targeting small segments. Here, we should mention that a target market differs slightly from a target audience: 

A target market is a group of people who might be interested in buying your product or service. In contrast, a target audience is a group of people on whom you want to focus your brand messaging. 

However, it is important to conduct target market analysis to make more data driven decisions. Target market analysis will also help you narrow it down to the target customer. 

With an effectively chosen target audience, you are more likely to reach the target and close sales more often. Narrow targeting and segmentation will not only help you quickly guide your customers towards the decision stage. Moreover, they will help you understand their specific pain points and tackle them with your product or service in the long run.

Bonus Tip: Stay agile 

Nope, this is not a generic tip about being agile in this fast-paced world. On the contrary, in this case, you should be quick to react to changes in customer behavior.  Try not to stick to a buyer persona. Re-consider your target audience description every three months. Although it strictly depends on your industry and its development pace. A significant characteristic of your target audience could have changed. So you should keep track of changes to make informed decisions. 

In Summary

You can easily find your target audience by following these tips. The question “how to find your target audience” tends not to have a single answer. It is a thorough process and you should work hard on it. Your business success depends on these activities. As soon as you find your target audience, life will be easier. With the right target, you will also have the right customer journey. Moreover, your marketing and sales efforts will never be lost on the road. As a matter of fact you will notice an increase in return on investment. The right target audience also helps you think like your customers and easily help them solve problems.