How to Identify Your Target Audience
Creating a target audience is essential for knowing where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. It helps you to understand who your target customer is and what they care about. You want to learn and know things like…
- Where they hang out online and off
- The way they like to communicate
- Demographic information, like age range, expertise, job title, location, hobbies, etc.
- Psychographic information relating to their behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, etc.
Your target audience informs all elements of your overall content marketing strategy.
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Don’t Make This Common Mistake
When starting a blog, many brands make the mistake of focusing on their subject matter without really thinking through who they’re writing for.
What do I mean by this?
Well…
Let’s say you’re a real estate agent who’s decided to start a blog, but you’re not sure where to begin. You start writing about what it’s like to be a realtor and what you do on a day-to-day basis.
But stop! If your content is to serve home buyers and sellers, you really need to rethink your strategy.
Ask yourself, “Who is my content for?”
Instead of writing about what it’s like to be a realtor, which would be fine if your audience was other realtors, think about who you’re serving. Homebuyers and sellers, right? What would home buyers and sellers care to know about?
- Things like mortgage rates and home values.
- How to qualify for a loan.
- Where the best schools are.
- Where the best places to eat in the neighborhood are.
- What you need to do before you put your home on the market.
Think About How You Can Help Your Readers
Potential sellers want to understand why they should hire you and not your competition. They want to know the ins and outs of their local market. Homebuyers want to know where the best schools, parks, and convenient shopping are.
Examples of home seller topics could include:
- Why professionally staging your home is so important for getting top dollar.
- Should you list your home during the holidays?
- What are the latest trends in the market?
Writing on topics like these helps your audience and provides them with valuable information they can actually use.
So before you start blogging or create your next piece of content, think carefully about who you’re writing for. What would be of value to your readers? Ask yourself:
- Who are my ideal readers?
- What challenges do they face?
- How can I write content that solves those challenges with blog posts?
Think about your readers carefully and define them. This is your target audience.
Start Here
Here are the questions you want to answer when creating your target audience.
- What is your ideal customer’s age range?
- What stage in life are they at? Are they retired? College students? Young professionals?
- What is their spending power? How do they approach purchases in your price category? Do they have specific financial preferences or concerns you need to consider?
- What are their interests? What do they like to do? What are their hobbies? What other businesses do they engage with?
- What are their goals? What do they want to achieve?
- What challenges are they dealing with? What can you help them solve?
- And include anything else that identifies your group.
Free Target Audience Worksheet
Once you’ve clearly defined who your target audience is, you’re perfectly positioned to create content that appeals to your readers. You’ll also be able to shed light on things they’ve never even thought about.
When Writing, Create a Conversation
When you know who your audience is and what they’ll be interested in, it makes it much easier to create content geared toward them and their needs. And instead of writing for them, you’ll be writing to them — just like you’re having a real conversation.
Your blog should be conversational — like you’re speaking directly to them, face-to-face, human-to-human. This is a great way to establish rapport with your readers and lets them see your personality and who you are. Your personality adds another dimension to why someone would want to return and read additional content you publish.
And as you interact with your readers and gather more data, you’ll gain an increasingly accurate understanding of them — maybe even identify new opportunities and expand into additional audiences.
