Finding Your Target Audience (Ready, Aim, Fire!)

Who are you trying to reach? Possibly the most important aspect of content marketing is understanding your target audience. Know your customers! Who are they currently and who do you want them to be? There are some key research strategies that can help you figure this out. 

Ready…

The first step to understanding who your customers are is to be able to identify the categories they fit into. “Demographic” is the proper term here, and refers to things like age, gender, location, family size, ethnicity, religion, and even income. 

Take a look at the people buying your product or service. What do they all have in common? You can check social media analytics for information on which demographics interact with your posts, or checkout a few of their profiles to get a better sense of the “vibe” that they give. 

Every social media platform has some sort of built-in analytics tool. For Instagram it’s Insights (shown above), for Facebook it’s Meta Business, and for Twitter it’s just Twitter Analyitcs.

Aim…

Do a little more digging. What else does your target audience like (aside from you, of course)? Check out some of their social media profiles to find common interests, or just do general research on what their specific demographic enjoys. If you want to target a new audience, this is where you’ll do research about those people instead. 

Let’s say, for example, that your target audience is women ages 25-34 living in the Charlotte area. Well, what else do women ages 25-34 in Charlotte like?

Social media analytics are useful, but really the best way to know about your customers is the old fashion way: talk to them! You’ll discover more useful information than you ever could just reading through some bland, generalized reports.

Fire!!

Now you know the nitty-gritty details of who your customers are. How do you use it in your marketing endeavors? 

The simplest way is to use social media to target. When making a new post, use the built-in targeting tools to narrow down your audience before you send it off into the world. This will ensure your post is reaching the right people. 

If you want to get more advanced, you can use your audience information to curate your content to appeal to them. Let’s continue the example of apartment lifestyle videos. Remember the good looking 20-somethings from our last article? They weren’t just chosen to model because of their good bone structures. They were chosen because they match the demographic of the video’s target audience. 

Once you know and understand your target audience, everything you do should be with them in mind! Remember, very few businesses have a target audience of “everyone”, so understanding yours is key to a successful marketing strategy.