Identifying Your Target Audience: Why It’s Important & How to Do It
Before you establish your visual identity, before you make content, before you start posting on social media: know who your target audience is.
‘Why is that the first thing I need to do?’
Glad you asked. I’ll answer your question with a question: How can you create effective content that connects you to your audience if you don’t know who your audience is? You need to identify key elements about your audience to market to them effectively. I say this because you shouldn’t plan on marketing to 20-year-old girls the same way that you would market to 50-year-old men. Marketing isn’t a one-sized fit all.
If you want to be able to identify your target audience, be able to gather information about your audience, and improve how much you know your audience so you can make more accurately targeted content- keep reading.
When you don’t target your content, your content becomes aimless. While it is true that great content will attract a crowd, if you don’t target a specific audience it’ll be really hard to attract a specific crowd and get specific results.
When working with clients that are establishing their visual identity, I will often give them a questionnaire to help best identify their brand. I ask things like…
What problems do your products or services solve?
Who are your current customers?
Who is your competition? Why should potential customers choose you over them?
After answering these questions you’ll be able to answer these questions about your audience and the content you make for them:
Who is going to look at my content?
What is my competition doing? Can I do it better?
Why should my customers look at my content vs my competitors?
We know it can be overwhelming to think about all this stuff but it’s simpler than it at first appears to be. Don’t think too deep into it. These answers will soon turn to the stepping stones that guide you in identifying your content core.
Finding Your Content Core
The purpose of identifying your content’s core is so that you can know what to talk about to best promote what you do. It’s not always important to talk about yourself, your services, your products, or the problems you solve. Sometimes you need to talk about the things your customers are talking about. Sometimes you need to talk about relevant things in your chosen industry. We try to make Nina Kay Digital’s content be 20/80. 20 percent about us and our services, 80 percent about entertaining or informative stuff that my audience wants to hear or needs to know.
Tips to Find Your Target Audience
-Create Target Audience Profiles. By creating your ideal consumer profile you will be better suited to spot your target audience in real-time when the time is right. These won’t always directly reflect what your target audience ends up looking like but it’s a great place to start. Here’s a sample of a Consumer Profile that I made for a cosmetics company.
Tip: When you first start you might not have an audience to speak to yet. Using your ideal consumer profile, you can then make content geared towards that consumer. This will help you speak to your audience even if they haven’t found you yet. This will help you convert people from looking at your content to sales.
-If you have a pre-established audience (big or small), you can ask them some valuable questions This helps you know what your audience is thinking so you can best accommodate their needs and wants. When figuring out what questions to ask them keep in mind to make questions simple to fill out to aid in audience retention.
-If you have a website or Facebook group or an account with Google Analytics, you can use these dashboards to collect data for your audience. You can use this data to avoid making incorrect assumptions about where your audience is or what they want to see.
Once you know WHO your target audience is it’s important to then figure out what their pain points are. What do they want to do better? What stresses them out? Solving your consumer’s problems will give your content credibility and traction. Use this new-found knowledge to make content that is useful to your audience.
Tips for Creating Content that Converts
Share the benefit! Most people confuse features with benefits. Try not to do this. In other words, focus on the needs of your consumer vs your need to sell. Produce content that helps your audience be & do better. Information to help people solve problems on their own is one of the best forms of free marketing there is.
Always make sure your content has a call to action it. You got to tell your audience what to do. When you are direct, it leaves no room for misunderstandings. When you try to make sure every piece of content you make has some type of basic call to action, you will get better conversions. Don’t be shy!
When you see a lack of conversions with the content being made it’s usually because of an unclear call to action. Want someone to share your post? Say it! Want someone to sign up for your newsletter? Say. It. You can’t expect anyone to read your mind.
Don’t forget. Great content starts with a great understanding of your target audience! Now go out there and make some awesome stuff.
If you are still feeling overwhelmed after reading all this - Nina Kay Digital offers assistance in identifying your target audience, content strategy, and content creation. Contact us today and let us know if we can help you!