EMBiz: How to Find Your Target Audience
Cody Owens
How to Find Your Target Audience
Define and Refine Your Marketing Efforts
Hi everyone. Cody here with Elevate My Brand, and today I want to help you find your target audience. So this is incredibly important and one of the very first things we do with every client, because your target audience will direct everything that you do in your marketing, because everything, your messaging, branding, positioning, should all be focused on who your audience is and what they need and want. So I have a couple of ideas on how you can define who your target audience is.
Understanding Your Audience through Surveys
The first one is through surveys, so the quickest way to know what someone wants or needs is to ask them, right? So make sure if you can, once a quarter, you're conducting a survey with your current audience or with potential new audience, so that you can find out what they need and want. If you can't do it once a quarter, then at least do it once a year. And make sure that you're asking some of the same questions, but definitely different questions each time, so that you're making sure you were right the last time, or if anything's changed and you're collecting new information about your audience.
Utilize Competitor Research
The second thing you can do is market research. And this is really all about looking at your competitors. So go to your competitors' websites, look at what their copy is saying, go to their social channels, see if they have any sort of social media groups that they are targeting, specific niche audiences. Really look at who they are trying to target, and then you can kind of determine, are those the same people we want to target or are they leaving people out that are really important to our service or product?
Identify White Space in Your Market
The next thing you can do is what we call a marketing positioning map. So, this basically looks like an X and y axis, where you put something on one and something on the other. So it may be calories on one and the other is going to be price. So then you take all of the direct and indirect competitors in the market and then you place those where maybe they have, this one has a higher price and higher calories, this one has lower calories and then a lower price. And then you can plot all of those on there. I recommend doing at least ten, if you can, and then you can see where the white space is. Then you can say, oh, well, there's not really anyone who's targeting someone with this particular intersection of price and calories. And that's just one example, I would recommend doing multiple of those. So change the X axis or the y axis to different categories and then once you're done, you can really target and say, oh, here are five different characteristics that have white space. And then we can really go after those target audiences because they're not really being targeted by all of the people in the market currently.
Conduct a Creative Mind Map
The last thing you can do is you can call Elevate My Brand to conduct a creative mind map exercise where we do what we call audience personification, and we drill down and we create three to five audience archetypes based on your ideal audience. So we start by creating what those archetypes might look like. So maybe there's the soccer mom, and then there's the person who really cares about the environment. And so we create all these archetypes that really act as just hypotheses of who we think we want to target, and then we test those over time through ads, through organic social content, et cetera, to see if those are actually the audience that is right for your brand. So no matter which approach you take, make sure that you are constantly defining and redefining your audience and conducting that research so that you can elevate your brand the right way.