What is a target market? Why is your target audience important? This is what we will be discussing today.

You serve a certain segment of the population when you are in business. Too often entrepreneurs answer “Everyone” when asked about their target audience.

Instead, narrowing down “everyone”, to a smaller number of people who want and can afford your product or services is a better option.

If a consumer is located in an area where you don’t ship products, then he/she doesn’t belong within your target audience. A consumer who cannot afford the products you sell is not part of your target audience.

This will be explained in greater detail later. For now, the target audience is who you advertise and market to. These are the people who might convert into customers .

Let’s take a closer look at your target audience. We will break down the steps of defining your target market into manageable steps.

What is Target Audience Segmentation?

For a moment, imagine that you are designing a Facebook ad campaign. Because you don’t want to make money, you don’t want everyone to see your Facebook ads. Instead, your goal is to reach your targeted audience with your ads.

Facebook lets you narrow your audience down based on demographics and/or other characteristics, depending on what your marketing goals are.

You also know that different segments of your target market might be interested in your product or marketing services in Los Angeles.

Let’s suppose you sell sporting goods. Your audience could include teenage girls and boys who are interested in sports. One segment could include professional athletes. Another segment could include middle-aged women and men who are looking to get in shape.

You can segment your target audience to create buyer persons. These groups each represent a different segment of your target audience so you can offer them different marketing and ad creative.

What is the difference between the target audience and the target market?

Many people use target market and audience interchangeably. They are two different terms in marketing.

A target audience is any person who may be interested in your products and services. Your target audience is the people to whom you send a marketing asset or an ad.

What is the target audience for marketing?

People are the ones who may convert to your marketing asset. Marketing assets could be landing pages, Facebook posts, squeeze pages, product pages, or other types of marketing assets. This could be an email that you have sent to a specific audience segment or a direct mailing you are sending.

Your target audience is part of your target market. Segmentation is a way to send the right message at the right time to the right person. You must segment your entire audience to market just like you segmented your email list.

How Important Is It to Identify Your Target Audience?

Imagine visiting a car dealership. Although you are paired up with a salesperson to help you, he won’t ask any questions about your needs or wants. He will show you sedans and sports cars over the next hour and wax poetic about the beautiful beltlines and fine leather seats.

Finally, exasperated, you say “I’m the mother of four.” I need a minivan that my children can’t damage.

This should be enough to show you how important it is to define your target audience. You won’t sell a sports car for two to a mother with four children.

You must not overlook the important segments that are sometimes less dramatic.

Take a look at the landing pages of your website. You want to establish a connection with a consumer when he visits your landing pages. Your imagery, headline, body, and CTA should all be relevant to the consumer’s needs. The consumer will quickly move on if it doesn’t.

This is possible by clearly defining your target audience, and then sending them marketing materials that resonate with them. It’s not enough to just send out landing pages and emails, hoping that a few will stick.

Six Steps to Define Your Target Audience

Ann Handley, Marketing profs, once stated, “Even if you market to your entire audience or customer base, you are still speaking to one human at a time.”

This is great advice for entrepreneurs who are slowly coming to terms with what their target market is or audience.

Handley makes a strong case for narrowing your audience. You need to learn everything about the individual you are speaking to.

Which are your pain points? Fears? Insecurities? Objections? This information will help you to deliver a message that is both persuasive and resonant.

You’re not the only one struggling to identify your target audience. Let’s break it down into six simple steps.

Step 1: Survey your current customer base

Surveys are often overlooked. Surveys can provide a wealth of information that you can use to target your audience. As long as you ask the right questions, they will give you a lot of useful data.

SurveyMonkey found that the average market survey has 13 questions, while all other surveys have four to fourteen questions.

Remember that customers have busy lives. They’ll quit if they find it too difficult to complete a survey.

While being concise is a good idea, it’s advisable to ask more probing questions. Because the survey taker must put more thought into their answers, fill-in-the-blank questions can offer greater insight than true/false and scale-style questions.

These questions might help you get started:

• What are your biggest frustrations when it comes [to your niche]?
• What price are you willing to pay [product] with [list features]?
• Which social media site do you spend the most time on?
• Are you having any urgent questions about [niche]

To build buyer personas and create landing pages, emails, or other marketing assets, use the survey answers. The last question could be used to generate ideas for blog posts with a CTA to create a landing page.

Step 2: Engage with your audience

Content marketing is essential for every entrepreneur in any industry. It not only drives website traffic but also opens up conversation topics.

Do you respond to comments on your blog, for example? Neil Patel is the co-founder and chief executive of Kobe Digital. He answers all questions. Although he doesn’t always provide detailed answers to every question, he makes sure his readers know that he is listening.

It’s possible to go beyond just connecting with your audience and having a conversation. Listen to your audience’s questions, comments, and anecdotes. These can provide insight into your target audience’s thoughts, desires, and needs.

Social media is the same. Do not just take the ego trip if you receive 10 comments on your Facebook post. Answer each comment, and then note any insights that could help you better understand your target market.

Step 3: Convert frustration into motivation

After you have surveyed your audience, start participating in conversations. Now, look at your notes to find pain points and objections. Find out the problems that your customers and followers are facing.

Perhaps you work in the SAAS sector and have a CRM tool. Your prospective customers don’t seem impressed with your ability to connect with them via multiple channels. It’s frustrating.

Make it a motivator. Use it to your advantage when you talk with your target audience. Your customers will appreciate the frustration.

Keep a list of your frustrations and motivations. You can then refer to these as your business develops.

Step 4: Determine who your target audience is

While you have a better understanding of your target audience, it is important to also know who to exclude. This is especially important when advertising via social media or search.

You should exclude potential customers that don’t fit your target audience. Determine who isn’t worthy of your attention.

Perhaps you are marketing only to women. This would leave roughly half of the population outright there.

Maybe it’s not as dramatic. You need to be aware of whether you are not catering to customers over 50 years old.

Step 5: Look at the competition 

Copying the competition is not something you want to do. This is a recipe for disaster.

You can refine your target audience by keeping an eye on your direct competitors.

Look at their landing pages, squeeze pages, and product descriptions. Find out what they aren’t doing to give your target audience the product they want.

Step 6: Find out how your audience navigates to your website

We discussed using your website to communicate with your visitors. Your website may offer more information and insight.

To monitor audience behavior, use Kobe Digital. User behavior reports show you where visitors click, what pages they scroll down, what percentage click on a specific link, and if your signup forms receive enough attention.

Kobe Digital also offers Records that allow you to track a visitor’s exact navigation through your website. For example, you can see when the visitor’s mouse stops at an interesting testimonial or a signup page that is confusing.

This will give you a lot of data and insight to help narrow down your target audience, and directly address their needs. For example, if they aren’t paying attention to your CTA (for instance), you might consider moving it higher on the page or redesigning it to make it more visually impactful.

Understanding Target Audience: 2 Real Examples

Let’s take a look at how target audiences have helped companies engage customers and grow their brands.

1. Huggies

Outbrain published a target audience case on Huggies. This brand is a line of baby care products. Outbrain stated that Huggies needed to reach new audiences while keeping its core audience in mind.

Outbrain used native content to increase Huggies’ exposure through established publications.

This campaign brought in 20 times more traffic than what the brand received via search traffic.

You must know your audience when it comes to native or sponsored content. What publications could reach people who may not have heard of your brand?

2. Fun and Function

Fun & Function is a website that sells products to special needs children. It needed to decide if it should be expanded into schools. This project would involve creating a new catalog specifically for the educational market, or at least a completely different cover.

According to Inc. According to Inc. Magazine, Fun and Function analyzed every aspect of the expansion and determined that it was not a cost-benefit decision. This is a wonderful example of how a company uses its target audience to make difficult decisions.

Fun and Function knew its target market well. Fun and Function also understood that its products could be beneficial to special needs children in educational settings. The company was forced to cancel the project, even temporarily, due to the high cost.

You should consider whether increased traffic and sales can outweigh the associated costs when researching expansions.

Conclusion

It is more important than you think to know your target audience. You don’t have to assume that every person is a potential client. Instead, focus on the people who are most likely to want your product/service and have the ability and motivation to purchase it.

Do customer research. Use social media and blogs to communicate with your audience. You can also test content elsewhere, such as guest postings.

You can better serve your audience if you have more information.