Tips for Identifying Your Target Audience

After spending months or even years, developing the right product or service, you're finally ready to share your business with the public. While it is relatively simple to create a general advertising campaign to reach the masses, spending your time and resource identifying more targeted markets can help you maximize your marketing return on investment. Knowing who you should market to, and the best time to market your products or service can result in higher rates of return. Here's how to get started identifying your target audience.

Consult Your Business Plan
When you developed your business plan, you set a number of goals for yourself. Take a look at these goals and analyze the products or services that you provide. Think about how they fulfill a need or solve a problem for your potential customers. Figuring out your unique selling point is the first step in identifying your target audience.

Begin Researching
Start researching your industry, the market, the competition, and the large pool of potential customers you've already identified. A lot of this research has already been done and can be found in existing sources. If you can't locate any useful secondary data that is useful, you may want to conduct primary research by sending out surveys, doing interviews, or holding focus groups to get the information you need.

Develop a Customer Profile
After youÕve completed your research, you will use the information you gathered to develop a customer profile. This will be an in-depth description of who your typical customer might be and will include things like demographics and psychographic information. The demographic information should include age, gender, location, marital status, ethnic background, income and more. The psychographic information should include interests, values, hobbies, behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle, and more. 

Find Your Audience
You can't simply define who your target audience is, you have to find out what sites they visit and which social media platforms they use most frequently. The information you gather for your customer profile, along with knowing where they hang out online will help you determine how to deliver your message.

Your work doesn't end once you've identified your target audience. You have to continue to perform research to stay current on the industry and market trends, as well as your competition. Continued monitoring will also show you if and how your existing audience and potential customers evolve. Following these tips for identifying your target audience will help you develop a solid content marketing strategy.
