How to Find the Target Audience for Your Business

As a business, establishing your target audience is crucial to your company in several ways. Not only does it help you pinpoint exactly what group you are trying to sell your goods or services to but without establishing one, you won’t know what tone to use in messaging and marketing, what social media platforms are best to reach them, and more. Identifying your target audience will help your business to make sure it is sending the right message to the right people. Here are some helpful ways to identify your business’s target audience.

Use Your Current Customers

Before you jump into identifying your target audience, look at the smaller scale first. Who is your target customer? You can do this by understanding your current customers. Ask yourself what your current and past customers look like. Identify your target customer by looking at the shared characteristics of your past and current customers. Then, you can break up the overlapping characteristics into groups to identify the best way to market to each group that is worth marketing to.

Research Your Industry and Competitors

If you want to impact your market and target audience, then you’ll need to know your competitors well. This means understanding your competitors, your industry, the market, and your potential target audience. Research who your competitors are marketing to, what products and services they are marketing to these customers, and how they are doing the marketing.

You can also research your current customers in order to find your target audience. Look at what your current best customers are purchasing from you, find out how they found your business, what interests them, why they want your goods or services, and what they like or dislike about it. Once you have all this information from your current customers, it can help you to put together a target audience of potential customers.

Who Benefits from Your Features?

When you’re trying to identify your target audience, look at the people who need or have an interest in your products or services. To do this, look at all the features your business is offering, then ask yourself: who is benefitting from these features? One way to look at this is that you’re the solution to a certain person’s problem. Now, think about your goods or services—what problem are they the solution to? Taking this “backward” approach is a great way to identify your target audience by starting with your final goal. Just remember to always ask yourself who could buy what you are selling to find your ideal clients.

While these aren’t all the ways that you can go about finding your target audience, they’re a great starting point. In addition to evaluating current customers, research, and your features, you can try sending out surveys to find out who your customers are. Looking at customer feedback will also help you understand your target audience: who are one-time customers and who are returning clients? Once your target audience is identified, it can help you create a strong marketing strategy to reach your customers. If you need help developing a marketing strategy or are not sure where to start, consider hiring Skoshe for all of your online marketing needs.