It’s hard to create compelling content and succeed in digital marketing if you don’t know your audience. To elevate your brand’s marketing it’s important to find your audience. But why and how? Where do you even get started? Punch are experts when it comes to digital marketing and we’re here to walk you through finding your target audience.
What is a target audience?
In basic terms, a target audience is a group of people identified as being likely customers of a business. They’re a group of people defined by certain demographics or behaviours.
To break it down even more – they’re the people you want to reach. Finding your target audience should be the first step towards any brand’s marketing strategy.
Why is it important to know your target audience?
Knowing your audience is key to being able to create brand marketing that works.
If you’re trying to sell a product or a service, you want to sell it to people who, well, want the product and/or service! That means working out who you’re selling to. Finding your target audience means you can market straight to them.
Additionally, you can’t move your audience through the customer journey without truly understanding them. You can craft successful content in terms of interaction but if you’re not able to convert those interactions into clients or sales then the people engaging with your content aren’t your target audience.
You need to create content that fits your target audience. It also means you can stop wasting time, money, and resources on people that aren’t going to convert, meaning you can funnel that money into more successful campaigns and create better content.
If you can find your target audience you can market to them directly, building relationships, creating loyalty, and starting a community. If you’d like to know more about the importance of a loyal community, you can check it out in our blog here.
The important takeaway here is that it is becoming increasingly important to find and target your audience as consumers continue to trend towards personalisation and personalised interactions.
A mass-market demographic-based appeal doesn’t work, as consumers value individualism. Accenture reports that 79% of consumers are more loyal to brands that use personalisation tactics.
More direct marketing tactics such as SMS and email marketing are on the rise, and consumers want to feel heard and seen. If you can represent them in the content you put out and answer their actual pains and needs, then you’re more likely to convert them into actual customers of your business.
Punch Top Tip:
Before knowing your audience you have to know who you are.
It’s key to establish what your brand is and what the purpose of your service or product is key before you go onward to identifying your audience. If you’re not clear about what, how are you going to work out who wants it? It can sound complicated but it’s really the most basic thing. You’ve got a product, you’ve got a name, you’ve got goals – time to figure out the who and the why.
If I’m going to go on a date, I’ve got to know what I want and what I’m all about. Otherwise, it’ll be twenty minutes of silence followed by a swift ghosting.
Your brand personality is the personification of a brand. Make your brand personality clear and then you can find the audience that will respond to it.
What will your audience look like?
There are several different ways to identify your audiences. When it comes to differentiating factors you can look at interests, subculture, or purpose. The most basic (and perhaps outdated) way to segment demographics is through these top five:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Employment
- Location
But target audiences are far more nuanced than this now. Splitting the audience by demographics is old school. For your digital marketing team, it’s out. What’s in is buyer types and audience personas. Look into what your audience’s pain points are and use that to figure out how you can solve them.
People who may share traditional factors and be in the same demographic (i.e. woman in her twenties) may have completely different pain points, wants, needs, and interests. You can also have more than one audience persona for your brand.
One interesting way to identify and categorise your target audience is through customer personas. Many marketers look to define 4 specific types which are split like so:
- Competitive
- Spontaneous
- Methodical
- Humanistic
Others use a narrative form to create customer personas for brands to target their content towards, giving a personal touch to the process, and helping to create a connection. This can be done by using case studies or building outwards from demographic research. You can create a name, a job, an age, motivations, challenges, and more! Get up close and personal with your audience personas – we’re sure they won’t bite!
How to get started finding your target audience:
- Look at Google Analytics
- Look at social analytics (Facebook, Instagram, etc)
- Look at high-performing content, what are people engaged and interacting with?
- Look at competition
- Do some consumer research
- Look at surveys online (like YouGov) and if there isn’t the information you need, create the survey!
How will it look in practice?
The way you use your target audience is up to you, but we can see ways brands have utilised it successfully through examples like Vans. Vans has a very clear audience – skaters, surfers, punk rockers, and those looking for an edge. But it wasn’t always this way.
Vans was fairly unsuccessful as a shoe manufacturer until in the 1970s it started to target skateboarders. Before this, they were creating tennis shoes for families, and even clown shoes.
This niche allowed Vans to continue to develop and succeed, with the drive of this rich skateboarding heritage at the forefront of its marketing. However recently, vans have expanded its focus to acknowledge its wider audience, past its subcultural integration.
Nowadays, Vans differentiates its content on different Instagram accounts for different target audiences due to its wide product range and varied audience (skaters, surfers, etc) with Vans Girls and more. This specificity allows it to narrow down its vast target audience and place emphasis on individual demographics. The majority of the footwear company’s web traffic is women (51.16%), meaning that this Instagram account is specifically for its ladies’ footwear range, it’s just needed – but celebrated.
Research also shows that in terms of popularity, ownership, and loyalty, millennial and Gen Z consumers far outrank any other age demographic for Vans, meaning this social media marketing heavy drive with specialist accounts created for Instagram is one that is likely to reach these consumers and leads to better conversion and engagement.
Knowing your audience means serving them better, which serves you better.