7 Tips to Know Your Target Audience Better

For any business organization to create a marketing strategy, it is vital to know your target audience. But how do you do that?

Today, there are different types of marketing styles and strategies. Brands need to accept the one golden rule – Know your audience, inside and out.

When you know your customers on a personal level, there are chances that your digital marketing efforts will succeed. On the other hand, if you don’t use personalized messaging and tailored experiences with your target market, your brand credibility will quickly diminish, and so will your audience.

If you know your audience, it is easier for you to implement the right social media marketing services. You can choose the right messages to deliver along with other marketing offers once you have loyal customers

In this blog, we take you through seven ways in which you can learn more about your target demographics.

1. Start with Research

The most important step is market research. Identify the right demographics for your product or brand. Many tools can help you do the same and extract essential pieces of information about particular demographics.

As you do your market research, remember to navigate to learn about related niches. Don’t just focus on the demographic you had thought about in the beginning. Gather sufficient information to derive conclusions about your target audience.

2. Analyze your competition

This is another step forward in market research. After you’ve made attempts to know your target audience, it is time for you to know your competition. Look at competitors who have a similar target audience. Analyze their brand, their messaging, the media and the marketing strategies they implement to advertise themselves. Evaluate their customer communication.

Start with an analysis of their social media pages. What are the techniques they use? Is there a specific kind of phrasing? Do they pick particular images? It is true that your competition may not know what they are doing but still, take note of what works and what doesn’t. Such a strategy will help you understand what doesn’t seem right and why.

3. Establish a customer persona

Most businesses know about the tried and tested tactic of the customer persona. Creating a customer persona helps to better conceptualize the target demographics. The activity leads to the development of a fictional character, whom you draw out with inputs like educational qualification, career, financial status, family life, interests, preferences as well as details like name and personal characteristics.

Having a customer persona is advantageous. It lets you communicate with your target customer and acts as the right tool to help your team members become efficient. When you know what kind of person you need to reach out to and communicate with, you can proactively develop messaging and campaigns.

4. Start a dialogue

This step is only possible when you have real customers. When you interact with them at an individual level, spend some extra time to understand them personally.

What are their concerns? What sets them apart from other demographics? What are their interests? What attracts them? What do they dislike? There’s a lot to learn, and you can only do that through dialogue.

These insights aren’t sufficient for the entire audience, but when you interact with more clients personally, you will notice a common pattern. With all the overlaps, you can start creating useful and insightful generalizations.

5. Respond to comments and reviews personally

Comments and reviews are an important part of social media marketing services. Make sure you monitor these to understand how many people are reacting to your messages, how they are responding, and what is the frequency of their response. If you interact with your customers, you can develop a better understanding of their background and accordingly shape your marketing campaigns.

More engagements (likes, comments, and shares) mean that your social media campaign is fairing well, and you have established a brand image. This information also helps you discover what kind of messages appeal to your target audience and what content topics they value. You must keep an eye on these metrics to understand patterns over time and understand your audience in a better manner.

6. Monitor external social behaviours

The technique of social listening is also useful when it comes to the understanding of your target audience. Using the same, you can learn what topics your customer is interested in and what they are doing.

The objective of witnessing the social media habits of your target audience is to see what they engage with and get new ideas. You can discover current trending topics and participate in the same to develop different messaging angles. Moreover, you can uncover new approaches that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought about.

7. Organize surveys

When you think about how to know your target audience, the most obvious step that comes to your mind is conducting surveys. You can ask questions to gather information about anything, and this does not take very long with tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms.

You can send surveys to your social media followers and your email subscribers. After you receive the results, you can quantify them to achieve the results you wanted. An interesting thing about surveys is that you may need to associate them with an incentive or a prize. This way, the chances of participation are higher, and you can achieve more results to draw an analysis.

Why should you get to know your customers?

An understanding of your customers is important to create content marketing strategies or brand promotion campaigns. In the absence of such an understanding, brands tend to incline towards creative elements, forgetting about the desires, preferences, and specific needs of their target customer.

Customers serve as the lifeblood of any business, and getting inside their skin is the only way to understand how you can inspire, engage, and connect with them. Only when you know your customer inside and out can you communicate with them in a meaningful as well as valuable way.

Conclusion

All the strategies shared above help you to have a better idea of your target audience. However, do remember that this is only the first step. After you understand the lifestyles, habits, preferences, tastes, interests, and behaviours of your target customer, you will have to accordingly devise your marketing strategy and promotion efforts.