How to Find Your Target Audience for More Focused Marketing

Do you need to cut down on your marketing budget? Do your ads fail to hit the mark with customers? Is your sales department struggling to find solid leads? If you’re struggling to connect with your customers with your current marketing strategy, you may be marketing to the wrong audience. Get your marketing back on course with these tips for how to find your target audience and reach them more effectively. 

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience consists of the customers that a company is trying to reach. For example, children could be the target audience of a toy company, and new parents would be the target audience of a baby formula company. Any time you are putting out an ad with a particular type of customer in mind, you are marketing to your own chosen target audience.  

What is the Purpose of Knowing Your Target Audience?

It is so much easier to reach your customers when you know who they are. Businesses who don’t know what their target audience is often end up spending extra money on marketing aimed at the wrong crowd. For example, a book shop might be marketing to retired people above the age of 40, when locally their customer base is mostly art students between the ages of 21–35. This would mean that most of their advertising would be meant for people who are less likely to buy their books and their marketing budget gets wasted. 

What Are the Different Types of Target Audience?

There are many demographics that can make up your target audience. Your customer base might be defined by age, socio-economic status, family size, values, political ideology, geographic location and more. You also can have more than one target audience that may or may not overlap. For example, a dog walking service may have customers that are either working professionals or elderly retired people with physical impairments. An estate agent may have customers made mostly of first-time home buyers and home rental companies. Even a toy company would want to make sure their marketing appeals both to the children who play with their toys and the parents who actually pay for the toys. 

What Are the Roles of Your Target Audience?

When you know who your target audience is, there are a few things you can do. If you are targeting an audience that isn’t interested in your business, you can change tactics and identify a new target audience for your marketing. This will make your marketing and sales efforts more profitable and help you avoid spending money on the wrong crowd.  

Knowing your customers also means you can change your products or services to match what your audience is looking for. For example, if a food shop discovers that most of their customers are interested in healthy eating, they can decide to offer more organic and wholefood options. This would increase their sales and draw in more customers from within their target audience. 

How to Find Your Target Audience

There are all sorts of methods companies can use to identify who their real target audience is, and it all starts with identifying your goals. Do you want to reach more of the same people, or do you want to branch out to new types of customers? For example, a charity shop whose customers are mostly bargain hunters may decide they want to start marketing more towards influencers and novelty collectors. If you want to reach out to new customers, try looking at your competitors to see who they are marketing toward and what methods they’re using to reach their target audience. 

However, if you’re trying to discover more about your current customer base so you can reach them more effectively, you can use customer surveys on your website, social media and on-location to learn more about your customers. Make sure to include questions about their demographic, their interests and what they would like to see more of from your company. You can also use market research companies and online tools to learn more about who is most engaged with your business. 

Target Audience Examples

Here are a few more target audience examples and how companies can use them: 

• A local coffee shop works with a cat rescue centre to let customers sit and play with cats that are up for adoption while they have their coffee. All of their marketing is targeted towards older women in their late 60s, who they believe may be more interested in adopting older cats. However, after taking a survey, they discover that most of their customers are actually younger adults between the ages of 18–35 and of all genders. The coffee shop changed their marketing and business has been better than ever!
• A small hair salon offers all sorts of hair treatments and products from their shop, but they want to improve business. After checking the census for their area, they discovered that the area has a large Black population and many large families. They changed their ads to market their treatments for natural curly hair and began to offer family hair cut packages for customers who bring their children, increasing their sales with every customer.
• A small business sells organic makeup online and do most of their marketing through ads. When they looked at their competitors, they discovered that most people looking for makeup follow their favourite brands on social media. They moved some of their marketing budget from paid ads to maintaining social media profiles on the most popular sites and were able to quickly increase their sales for half of their usual marketing costs.

How to Choose Promotional Products for Your Target Audience

Just like any other marketing method, promotional products should be chosen with your target audience in mind. Think about where you want your brand to be seen, and where your customers would use your products. Some products can be used by just about everyone, such as tote bags, drinkware and pens.  

However, you can find the perfect bag or drinking glass to match your target audience. For example, wholefood shoppers love organic cotton tote bags, and customers with big families will be interested in shopping totes with a large capacity. People who spend a lot of time indoors would love a trendy custom coffee mug, but people who spend a lot of time outdoors may prefer a travel tumbler or water bottle. 

If you want to have the most effective marketing, make sure you know who you’re marketing to. Take the time to do your own market research and learn how to find your target audience. Knowing your customers better empowers you to reach them more clearly, effectively and efficiently. After all, how can you hit a target if you don’t know what you’re aiming for?