No matter what medium or channel you use or how inspiring your ad message may be, your marketing campaigns will only be successful if you’re addressing the right crowd. Defining your online audience is the foundational step in any sound marketing strategy.
Taking the time to deeply understand your target audience presents some much-needed benefits. For one, it allows you to spend your marketing dollars right where they would be most effective.
Even big brands with large marketing budgets adhere to this principle. In this article, we look at how you can define your online audience and reap its many rewards.
Who is Your Online Audience?
These are the people who are most likely to resonate with your business values. They are interested in or likely to be interested in your products or services.
Regardless of your approach to identifying and defining your online audience, the end goal is the same — amplified conversion rates and a solid, loyal customer base. Here’s how to set it up:
Define the value of your product or service
The best way to find your target audience is to first establish why people would want to buy whatever you’re selling. What specific needs or challenges does your business solve? In order to do this, ask yourself — who are the people most likely to benefit from this product? What are their pain points and how does your product address them?
For example, your business provides email marketing services, which as you know, requires some very specific skill sets. Your next step would be to identify who will benefit from email marketing and is having trouble setting it up.
Segment them by demographics
Now you have an idea of who to target, but for all we know, there could be billions of them scattered all over the world. So, we need to get more specific. A good place to start would be their demographics:
- Age – In what age range would they ideally be?
- Gender – Does your business cater to a specific gender?
- Location – Are you serving a specific location or marketing to a global audience?
- Education – This lets you know how to craft your marketing messages in a way that they would be most easily comprehended.
- Socioeconomic status – Price is an important factor on either side of the trade. Obviously, you’ll want to target people who can actually afford what you’re offering.
The more specific you can get, the easier it will be to create a personalized marketing experience for your target audience.
Check out who your competitors are selling to
More importantly, look at what your competitors are doing differently. If they have been successful in their business for some time, it’s likely because they know their audience well. So if you’re both selling similar products or services, you might as well see who they’re selling to, and why people would want to buy from them.
Check out their social media pages — who are the kinds of people that regularly engage with their posts? The beauty of this approach is that it often reveals targeting characteristics that you probably didn’t consider before.
Collect data
One of the best things about online marketing is that there is so much valuable data all around. All you have to do is collect them. One way to do this is to ask your website or social media page visitors to fill out a survey. In return, you can offer them a special price discount.
Figure out what you really want to know about your online audience that you haven’t covered in the demographics stage, but remember to craft your survey questions carefully. Keep it impartial and straight to the point. This additional data provides invaluable insight into the structure of your marketing strategy.
Utilize Google Analytics
Google Analytics tracks and collates relevant online data about your business. It provides insights that can help you decide how to run your marketing campaigns.
For instance, it shows who visited your website and whether they accessed it on a computer or a mobile device. It can also tell you the source of that traffic, how long they stayed on your site, what links they clicked, and many more important details.
With this, you know where to best reach your online audience, what time of day they are most active, and even what kind of content they respond to the most.
Need help defining your business’s online audience?
The key to succeeding in your business, whether online or a physical store, is to really know your audience. Once you know what they need and where to reach them, you can create the perfect solution and sell it to them.
Talk to Tulumi today about your digital marketing needs. We perform in-depth market research to identify and define your online audience to deliver data-driven results. Give us a call at (800) 481-1720 for a free consultation.
