Steps to Identify and Understand Your Target Audience
How many times have you struggled to figure out who your target audience is? Identifying your target audience on social media can be an overwhelming and daunting task. It’s easy to get confused and lose track of where you started from but if you follow these tried and tested steps you’ll be able to understand how to identify a target audience quickly and thoroughly.
Step 1. Understand your Product/Service
The first thing you need to do is understand the product/service you are trying to market. Prepare the product features and services list you have to offer. Having this written list in front of you while you follow through the rest of the steps are going to be a big help. You’ll keep revisiting these to make sure you’re on the right track.
Step 2. Segment the Market
Target audience segmentation is very important as you may have a variety of customers and the needs of one may vary from those of another. One might need to buy a product urgently, the other might take a long time to decide whether or not to make the purchase. Start with defining these customers. Let’s say you have 3 to 5 types of them. The first thing you need to do is name them and bring them to life. Imagine that they actually exist and you’ve known them a long time.
Answer these questions about each one of them:
Geographic
Where do they live?
What is the population of that place?
What is the climate like?
What part of the city do they live in?
Demographic
How old are they?
What’s their gender, race, and religion?
What’s their income level and occupation?
What’s their level of education?
What’s their marital status and family size?
What language do they use? The kind of vocabulary they’re comfortable with?
What’s their nationality?
Psychographic
What’s their lifestyle like? Are they conservative, struggling, mainstreamers, aspirers, explorer, or reformer?
What values or beliefs do they adhere to?
What is their attitude like?
What motivates them? Are they leaders or followers?
What activities and interests do they enjoy? How do they spend their spare time?
What social class do they belong to?
Where do they get their primary information from?
Behavioristic
Why/when would they buy your product?
How many number of times would they buy it?
What stage of the decision-making process have they reached?
What is the point of purchase?
For Example:
Adam is a 24-year-old male who lives in the outskirts of London. He’s a graduate and single. He enjoys reading and keeping up with what’s going on in the world. He gets his news from the sites he is following online. He is more of a leader than a follower and is in the process of looking for a job.
Trisha is a 35-year-old female who lives in South Delhi. She is a stay at home mom with two kids of 10 and 12. Her Social class can be described as upper middle class. She spends most of her time at home, she is interested in marketing and has years of experience in that field. She would like to start working again but from home.
Make customer profiles but make sure you don’t get carried away while making up these stories. Keep revisiting your product features and benefits to ensure that the person you are describing would be interested in your product.
Step 3. Research Research Research
Do a thorough quantitative and qualitative research to make sure these profiles are supported with numbers. Based on your finding through surveys, focus groups and data analysis, go back and edit these profiles so that they describe your customers more closely.
Step 4. Choosing your Audience
Now it’s time to pick whom you’re going to market to aggressively and whom you’re going to soft sell to. It’s ideal to spend maximum marketing effort towards the largest group that promise good returns. But you also want to be careful not to create such a niche that you can’t move to a different segment.
Think about the audience you want to target very carefully and thoroughly. If you are unable to answer these questions or find it difficult to identify your target audience on social media for your marketing strategy, get in touch with us to start marketing more effectively.
RedAlkemi was created out of the desire to deliver measurable online success to its customer base. The founders consider themselves the alchemists who work with passion (Red) to develop processes (Alkemi) that turn a basic digital presence to a measurable and successful one, therefore the name RedAlkemi.
Yes, it’s possible! Motivated by innovation, RedAlkemists believe they can help take your business to the next level. In an ever-evolving online environment, our vision is to keep “Shaping a holistic digital presence for businesses through innovative processes.”
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