The World Wide Web has produced a brand new breed of buyers. 21st-century buyers are experienced, independent and well informed. But they are more overwhelmed with competing demands for both time and attention than ever before.
So how do you make sure that these buyers choose you?
The internet is a big place. There is a lot of competition in almost every market, and there are many different ways to interact with consumers. That makes one question key to many businesses’ success:
How do you get your content, products or services in front of the people most likely to buy from you?
If you take one thing away from this article it should be this: attracting a target audience is a research process.
Everything you do to build your online presence, SEO, social media marketing, PPC campaigns, content marketing and website optimisation will be more powerful when it is driven by user research.
And the better you do your research, the greater success you’ll have in both attracting relevant internet users to your website and making sure that your target visitors are satisfied with what they find once they get there.
Why Your Target Audience Can Make or Break Your Marketing
We’ve all been there. You’re half-heartedly flicking through a magazine in a boring waiting room and come across a full-page ad that was seemingly composed just for you. Or you’re riding the tube, half-asleep, and catch a glimpse of an ad that instantly grabs your attention and wakes you up. Maybe you’re watching a game on TV, and a half-time ad makes you momentarily put down your beer. It speaks to your interests. It understands your thought process. It knows exactly what you need before you even realise you need it.
Maybe it’s fate.
Maybe it’s a coincidence.
Or, much more likely, it’s the result of in-depth target audience research and analysis that has resulted in a perfectly pitched marketing campaign, allowing this brand or product to work itself right into your mind, and probably, your wallet.
Knowing and understanding your target audience can make or break your marketing campaign.
Sure, you could spend a heap of money to have your ad displayed on a billboard on the side of the road, and it’s guaranteed to be seen by a huge number of people, but what percentage of those are the right people?
If your product is horseriding hats, then your ad is going to be better off reaching a smaller number of people, a high percentage of whom are likely to have an interest in horseriding. In this case, an equestrian magazine would be a better fit to connect your marketing campaign with your target audience, over a roadside billboard.
A targeted campaign not only gives you a better return on investment but also allows you to speak directly to your consumers, building a relationship and community that can create loyalty and a base of customers that continue to return in the future.
But before you get into the practicalities of how to reach your target audience, first you need to determine exactly who the target audience is.
Who is Your Target Audience?
Your target audience can be identified based on gender, age, interests, subcultures, location, and a range of other factors.
Demographic
The demographic might be obvious.
It refers to the type of people who are likely to be interested in your product.
For example, if they are female or male, over the age of 18, or the age of 60. If you’re selling toddler shoes, then your demographic is children under the age of five. If your product is houseplants, then your demographic might be more broad and consequently harder to nail down.
When the demographic is broad, you can define your target audience based on other factors.
While both men and women of any age might be interested in houseplants, the one thing that links them all is their interest in plants.
Which brings us to our second point.
Interests
For anyone selling a niche product or service, determining the interests of your target audience is essential, and can help you to narrow down the people you want to market your campaigns towards.
They may share an interest in specific hobbies, genres of entertainment, or styles of interior design.
Subcultures
To further define your target audience and gain an understanding of the type of person you’re trying to connect with, it can be helpful to determine subcultures.
We covered this topic in-depth, in our Consumer Culture Theory post.
This refers to a very specific shared interest or experience of the consumer.
For example, Taylor Swift fans, known as ‘Swifties’, identify as belonging to a subculture community that could be tapped into if you’re selling posters of Taylor Swift song lyrics.
Location
The location might be important if you’re selling a product that is aimed at a certain type of lifestyle or climate.
For example, if you’re selling boats then you’ll likely want to focus your marketing efforts on coastal communities.
If you’re trying to attract customers to visit your independent record shop in Bristol, it will be pointless marketing your ad across the whole of the UK since only a small number of the people seeing the ad will be geographically close enough to visit your store.
For these types of campaigns, determining the location will have a significant impact on your success.
Track Down Your Target Audience
Figuring out who your target audience is and where you can find them doesn’t happen overnight. It takes significant research and evaluation, which can be achieved in multiple ways.
Analyse Your Existing Client Base
If you have existing customers then you already have a plethora of information you may be able to tap into:
- Where are your customers based?
- Are they male or female?
- How old are they?
- What are they interested in?
- What content do they engage with?
- What do they spend their money on?
- How much money do they spend?
- How did they find your business?
Identifying trends in your existing customer base gives you a strong indication of who your target audience is.
You can gather the information you already have about your customer demographics using analytics. Find out who is visiting your page, how they got there, what content they engage with, what they spend their money on and how much money they spend.
For this you can use tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
You can also create buyer personas using the information you gather. These personas represent the key demographics in your target market and help you make better decisions when planning campaigns, content and website improvements.
Collecting customer surveys can also help you understand what people want, what they value and why they chose your business.
Understand What Your Target Audience Wants
Once you have defined your target audiences, you know who they are.
What now?
More research.
You need to find out what drives them, what their likes and dislikes are, and what desires and motivations sit behind their choices.
Gathering this understanding allows you to connect with them and attract them more easily and more personally.
Figure out why they want your product or service and the emotions and motivations behind that choice.
Ask yourself:
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- What outcome do they want?
- What frustrates them about current options?
- What would make them trust a business like yours?
- What would stop them from buying?
- What would make them choose you over a competitor?
The more you know about their buying patterns, expressed preferences, possible influencers that trigger buying in them, and reactions to advertising and marketing, the better.
Is Your Target Audience the Decision Maker?
For any product to sell, there has to be a decision-maker.
This is the person who clicks ‘buy’ on your website, or hands over their credit card in your store.
The decision maker may not always be the target audience your product is aimed at, but you do need to consider them when planning your marketing campaign, since without them, there is no sale.
For example, if you’re selling products aimed at children then the decision maker will likely be a parent or guardian. For women’s perfume, the decision-makers may be husbands and boyfriends purchasing the perfume as a gift.
This should be factored in when establishing your target audience and how you’re going to appeal to them.
Sometimes your campaign needs to speak to the user. Sometimes it needs to speak to the buyer. Sometimes it needs to do both.
Consider Your Competition
Looking at the types of ads your competitors are creating, and who these are aimed at, can teach you all kinds of things about your target audience and how they want to be communicated with.
For example:
- Is the message serious or playful?
- Does it have political undertones?
- Is it bright and bold or neutral and classic?
Having a keen insight into the market playing field is key to staying competitive.
The biggest brands that you compete with will often have a large budget to invest in market research, so they know how to target and engage your consumers. It’s important to keep an eye on these trends.
Yes, it can be disheartening going up against the big-name brands, but you can stay competitive by providing your audience with a fresh and unique take on content.
Don’t fight the big brands at their own game. Develop an angle that is true to your business, sets you apart and will connect with your target audiences. They will be attracted to your authenticity.
Take keywords for an example.
The most popular keywords return thousands of results. Top rankers for those search terms are market leaders. Those companies often have both the money to spend and the know-how to make sure they outrank you.
So here, small businesses shouldn’t always try to outrank industry leaders for the most competitive terms. Instead, they should try to find another keyword or keyword variation that is relevant for their audiences but isn’t as heavily fought for in the SERPs, and then work to become the go-to on that topic with high-quality engaging content.
Perform Market Research
Identifying gaps in the market and how your product or service can fill these gaps can help determine your target audience.
Conduct and analyse market research to your advantage.
Major industry websites often dictate trends in every sector of society, and your business is no exception. So, know who the big players in your industry are.
Listen to your target market and be ready to adapt to their requirements.
Where Does Your Audience Find Information?
Know what content is engaging your target audience and build an understanding of what they’re interested in from this.
Ask yourself:
- Do they search on Google?
- Do they use TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest?
- Do they read blogs or industry websites?
- Do they watch YouTube videos?
- Do they follow influencers?
- Do they compare reviews?
- Do they ask friends or community groups for recommendations?
One of the most important factors in effective targeting is understanding the platforms that your audience use and how they like to engage on them.
Make sure that you are active and visible on these platforms.
Every online platform is unique and as an organisation you should adapt your content to suit the environment. However, sometimes running the same message across all platforms can be a good idea, as long as the format and delivery suit the platform.
How Does Your Target Audience Search?
What search phrases might your target market type into search engines to find you?
Understand how your target audience searches. What do they type into that search bar when they want to find content surrounding your topic?
The words and phrases that they use are called keywords.
Keywords connect content that used those words to the search results that will appear for the searcher.
So, if you want to appear in their search results, you need to be creating content that focuses on the topics that your audiences are looking for on Google.
Keywords can be used to maximise your performance with:
- SEO
- PPC campaigns
- Social media marketing
- Website content
- Blog content
- Landing pages
- Product or service pages
SEO techniques will optimise your website and content to make sure that search engines promote your content for relevant keywords.
How Do You Target Your Audience?
Once you understand who they are and what makes them tick, you need to use this information to make sure your content gets seen by your target audience.
You need to formulate a marketing strategy that will target them specifically.
By doing this you can ensure that none of your spend is wasted on people who don’t want to buy what you’re selling.
You can do this through:
- Keyword targeted content
- Search engine optimisation
- Social media management
- Branding
- PPC campaigns
- Email marketing
- Website optimisation
- Content marketing
These techniques will get you in front of your target audience, but the strength of the result depends on the quality of the research behind them.
How to Attract Website Visitors
Now that you have targeted your audience, you need to make sure they follow through to your website.
You need to attract and engage them.
At the heart of your online business is one main goal: to motivate your customers to respond in the way you want them to.
If this task is not accomplished, it does not matter how unique your brand or marketing mix is.
You want your customers to see your marketing asset, whether that is a blog, ad, social media post, search result or email, and then take action.
To attract them, you need to know what motivates your target market.
Use Your Web Statistics
Both current and historical web statistics of your site are a good starting point for determining what your user wants.
Knowing your target audience will help you to communicate your value proposition in a way that speaks to them.
Web statistics can help you understand:
- Which pages attract traffic
- Which content keeps users engaged
- Which channels bring the most relevant visitors
- Which pages lead to enquiries or sales
- Where visitors leave your site
- Which search terms are bringing people to you
Incorporating research and data into your decision-making process will help you attract targeted visitors, build a lasting online presence and maximise your online success.
Provide an Authentic User Experience
It is crucial for the success of any marketing campaign to know as much as possible about the target audience.
But once you’ve gathered this information, you have to leverage it to attract those visitors.
Incorporate what you know about your visitors’ behaviour to strategically improve every touchpoint in your users’ experience with your company.
Basing your online efforts on user behaviour data will allow you to connect with visitors on a new level and optimise your conversion rates.
Building a trustworthy and relevant online presence is key to providing an authentic experience.
This means having consistent branding at all touchpoints, creating lifestyle affinity with social media, showing your subject authority by posting regular, high quality content, and critically, having a high functioning website that will combine the branding aspects of user experience with a seamless technical experience.
That means optimising elements of your website with tools such as:
- Page speed optimisation
- Technical SEO
- Information architecture
- Website maintenance
Provide the Content They Want
Good content is key to engaging your target audience.
We spend so much time on the internet that we have become accustomed to filtering out a lot of what we see. We’re pros at scrolling and scrolling without seeing much.
This makes it vital to the health of your website to produce content that you know will catch the attention of your target audience and stop them from scrolling on past.
So how do you create good content?
Tailor your content to your audience. Depending on the demographics of your target market, you may be dealing with multiple audiences.
In terms of social media alone, the older members of your market may use Facebook whereas younger users may be more likely to be found on TikTok, Instagram or another platform.
Understand where each audience is most likely to come across your content and what type of content they will engage with.
Adapt your style of communication for each audience but always keep your branding strong.
Just like people don’t speak to colleagues the way they speak to friends, but remain the same person, a business should adapt its style of communication to suit the audience while keeping its branding consistent.
Bring it all together on your website.
Your branding should shine through on your website, as it is your business’ online home. No matter what content led your visitors to your website, your voice should be recognisable to everyone.
Final Thoughts
How can you cater to your audience’s needs if you don’t know who your audience is?
Well, you can’t.
Establishing exactly who your target audience is and gaining an understanding of what they want and what they need is essential to the success of any good marketing campaign.
Knowing and putting them at the heart of your business development should be a driving factor in everything you do.
It’s how you’re going to attract new customers and keep the existing customers engaged.
Answering the questions in this guide will help you understand your ultimate goal in a clear way and, most importantly, put you in a much better position to optimise your site, improve your campaigns and attract the right visitors.
If you would like to learn more, get in contact with us for a site audit or a quick chat.
