In advertising, a target audience refers to the share of consumers a business hopes to reach. Your target audience is who you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts.
The goal is to target a person who shares your education, goals, interests, and problems. To sell your products, you need to target people who are likely to buy them.
Your site traffic might increase if you target people who don’t want to buy your stuff, but it won’t help you much. The reason why none of your visitors is buying from you will have you pulling out your hair.
Before we get into the details of finding your audience, let’s first discuss “personas” since many people mistake them for a target audience – resulting in wasted time and resources.
Related: Display Advertising
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In marketing, customer personas are profiles of buyers who would be your ideal customers.
A persona is a fictional character with characteristics similar to your actual customers. Based on target audience research, they can help you direct your marketing efforts.
A persona is a person that may be interested in what you have to offer since they’re very connected to your brand, and you must make an effort to make them a client and retain them.
A persona involves much deeper and more detailed research than your audience since it includes:
- personal characteristics
- purchasing power
- lifestyle
- interests
- engagement in social networks
- professional information
Read this guide for more details: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
Choose the right platforms for your target audience
Even if you have used social media platforms personally, it’s important to understand that using them as a digital marketer is very different. This reading will introduce how to set and achieve goals using specific social media tools and platforms.
Goal 1: Build connections with your audience
One goal of brands is to build relationships with their audience. If your brand or business has chosen to prioritize this as a goal or objective, you will want to consider which social media platforms are best for relationship building. For example, interactive, word-based platforms where people interact in short messages and where open communication is encouraged—like Twitter—are well suited to relationship building. This is because the art of conversation is so encouraged and prioritized on Twitter. It is perhaps one of the only platforms where a brand may post dozens of times a day, without overloading its followers.
To build relationships with your audience on a platform like Twitter, you will want to be responsive and engaging. If someone is interacting with your brand, feel free to reply promptly and keep the conversation going. If they are mentioning you because of an issue with an order, provide them with helpful, empathetic, and supportive customer service. Possibly the most important thing to remember while engaging with users online is to always make sure you are being authentic to your brand’s voice. Your followers will come to expect a certain voice, and they will recognize you for it.
Pro tip: Sometimes, it’s best to be proactive about relationship building. Instead of waiting for users to reach out to you, actively seek out authentic connections and communication within your community of followers.
Goal 2: Target new customers
If your goal is to target new customers, you may find some success on an image-based photo and video-sharing platform like Instagram. This is a good place to show people your product, rather than telling them about it. To target new customers, it is a good idea to tell your brand’s and product’s stories using interesting and dynamic visuals.
Instagram is effective for telling your brand’s story because its users spend significant time on the platform learning, being inspired, shopping, testing new things out, and so much more. And, it is a unique platform because brands can leverage other users with large followings to tell their stories as well.
For example, leveraging a strategy like an influencer marketing is an effective tactic to target new customers. Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market one of its products or services. When an influencer introduces your brand to their followers—a group of people who may not know about you yet—this can be really helpful for targeting new customers. Another example of an effective strategy is running social media ad campaigns, where your brand’s reach is sure to increase.
Pro tip: If you prioritize influencer marketing, make sure your partners have audiences that will be interested in your product once introduced to it.
Goal 3: Drive traffic to your website
If you want to drive traffic to your website, consider a social media platform that allows you to share articles, links, products, images, and reviews, like Facebook. If the content you are sharing feels fresh, and informative, and links back to your landing page, users will be more likely to click on it and end up on your webpage. If users like what they see on your page, they may share your content themselves, possibly resulting in even more website traffic.
When using a platform like this, it’s especially important to couple your brand’s voice and visuals together in a cohesive way. Your content all needs to feel purposeful and relevant, and draw users in, if you want to encourage website visitors.
Pro tip: Not all social media platforms allow you to easily share links to landing pages and other content, but doing so can be a great way to drive traffic to your site.
Key takeaways
You will likely choose to prioritize certain platforms over others depending on what your company’s goals and objectives are. However, you should feel free to push the same initiatives and campaigns on varying social channels as well. If you have goals that you think can be achieved on a few different platforms, you will still want to customize the content to be exactly what your audience on each platform wants.
Target Audience FAQs
What is the target audience?
A target audience is a group of consumers most likely to be interested in your product or service, and therefore, the ones who should see your advertisements. In addition to age, gender, income level, location, and interests, several other factors may determine the target audience.
What are the three types of target audiences?
The target audience for your online campaigns can be chosen in terms of their demographics, interests, or purchase intentions.
How do you determine your target audience?
Tactics to Identify Your Target Audience:
- Start with your current customers.
- Think benefits not features.
- Collect demographic data on your target audience.
- Send out customer surveys.
- Look for trends in online customer feedback.
- Go niche.
- Research your competitors.
- Create a market positioning map.
What is a target audience, and why is it important?
A target audience is a group of people to whom your brand appeals or whose products meet an unmet need. They are the most likely to purchase your products or services and have an interest in them.
Also Read: The Traditional Marketing Funnel to The Digital Marketing Funnel