Identify your ideal market & engage with the right people at the right time.

As a business owner, understanding your target audience is vital for success. Without this knowledge, it can be difficult to understand the needs of your customers and create high-conversion campaigns.

But figuring out who you’re marketing to can be tricky.

Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take in order to determine who your target audience is. Let’s explore how to identify who it is that you should be targeting with your marketing efforts.

1 | Research Your Industry

A great place to start when determining your target market is researching the industry as a whole.  

Ask yourself these questions as you research:

• Who are you trying to reach? 
• What do people need from your product or service? 
• How will you reach them? 
• What other businesses are in the same space? 
• Who are they targeting? 
• What kind of language do they use? 

Understanding your industry and who you’ll find there helps you get a better understanding of the current landscape, providing insight into which groups may be more likely to purchase from you. 

You’ll also learn how to best communicate with them so you don’t miss any valuable customer segments.

2 | Analyze Your Current Customer Base

Knowing exactly who is buying from you provides invaluable information about where to look for new customers and how best to engage them when marketing your business or brand.

If you already have customers, it’s important to analyze their characteristics and behaviors in order to gain insight into who else may want your product or service. 

Look at things like age, gender, occupation, income level, location, interests—whatever data points are most relevant for your business. 

Doing so will help pinpoint any existing patterns among customers so that you can focus on those groups when conducting further research and testing different advertising methods. 

3 | Create Personas

Once you have determined what type of people are likely interested in what your business offers, it’s time to create personas for each segment so that they become actual characters representing these groups of people instead of just abstract demographic data points such as age or location (although these factors still matter). 

Here at Jive, we also find it helpful to identify what kind of tech they might use, their goals, metrics, motivations, skills/strenghts, and what their biggest business challenges are. 

This will add an extra layer of depth and realism to each character created while also providing insight into why people buy from businesses like yours rather than competitors'.

It's also important at this stage in the process that you create ideal customer profiles based on what types of people would benefit most from what you offer – rather than just focusing on those already interested in purchasing from you. 

You will open up new opportunities for growth within other potential customer segments previously overlooked during initial research phases.

Take the time to identify who makes up your target audience. Your business will thank you. 

By researching industry trends, analyzing existing customer data, and creating personas for each potential customer segment identified, you should have no problem getting a better idea of who exactly makes up your target market. 

Knowing one's target audience makes all the difference when crafting effective campaigns that convert.

Need help figuring our your own target audience? We’re ready to roll. Schedule a call.