How to Define Your Target Audience

By: Aries Payne

In a highly competitive market, it’s critical for small business owners to identify their target audience. This unique market segment will inform your business’s marketing strategy, product development, and how you engage customers. 

So, how do you determine who’s a part of your audience? 

Dive Into Detailed Characteristics 

When you define your target market, you have to consider both who would benefit most from your products or services and who your competitors are currently targeting. This early market research typically results in grouping consumers by broader shared characteristics like age, geographic location, and income.

However, to identify your target audience, you’ll need to drill down to specifics.

• What sets your particular audience apart from the rest of the market?
• What are their values?
• What do their lifestyle and hobbies look like?
• What are their buying habits? 
• What are their challenges? 
• What do they hope to achieve? 

You’ll also want to learn about where and how your audience likes to spend their time online. You can leverage analytics to find these details, from their preferred social media platform to the type of content they most engage with on your website. You can also gain insightful data like keywords they use to find businesses like yours. 

Learn More About Your Current Customers 

As you research your target audience, consider acquiring feedback from your current customers or clients to better understand their perceptions and sentiments. You can do this through surveys, interviews, or focus groups. You can also gain additional insights from customer reviews and social media comments. 

To better understand your audience’s behaviors, you should also consider your customers’ buying journey: 

• Awareness – How do your customers become aware of your brand? 
• Consideration – What factors influence their decision to choose your brand? 
• Decision – What steps do they take before making a purchase? 

Create a Buyer Persona 

Create a buyer persona once you’ve identified your target audience’s characteristics and behaviors. A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. It should include the information you’ve gathered from researching your target market and audience: 

• Age
• Gender 
• Location 
• Income 
• Education
• Profession 
• Marital status 
• Hobbies and interests 
• Values 
• Brand preferences 
• Lifestyle 
• Challenges and goals 
• Buying habits and other relevant behaviors 

Connecting with Your Audience 

Once you’ve successfully identified and defined your audience and created a buyer persona, you can develop a marketing strategy that will help you connect with like-minded consumers in multiple ways: 

• Relevant, Compelling Content
• Targeted Ads
• Personalized Emails and Messaging 
• Influencer Marketing

Of course, this is just the beginning of an exhaustive list. We recommend that you contact one of our business advisors to connect with our marketing specialists to learn more about identifying your target audience and creating a marketing strategy to engage them.