Introduction

One of the most important tasks of a digital marketer is to target the right audience in the relevant market and niche. Audience targeting stands as the foundation of all the elements of your digital marketing campaign. Beginning from how to develop your offerings right to the marketing channels you choose to promote your offerings, all of it forms the very base of your digital marketing efforts and strategies.
You need to remember that not everyone is your target audience. You cannot create content that will be useful for everyone. You have to set your mind on a group or section of people who you can target and your content will be relevant to and useful for. You have to identify in order to dominate your specific niche of business.
The better understanding you gain of your audience, the better your audience-targeting will become. You will need to create relevant content, messages, and ads, that your target audience will be interested in.
You have to gradually increase the depth of your insights on audience interests and behaviors so that you can gain better conversion rates and better ROI.
In this article, we aim to guide you on how exactly you can put in efforts to understand and identify your target audience and interact with your audience in order to stand out to gain prominence among your competitors. Audience-targeting is all about narrowing your focus while you expand and extend your reach.

What is a Target Market?

A target market is the particular group of people who you want to reach out to with your brand message and marketing campaigns. Your target market is united by some commonly shared factors, demographics, and behaviors.
You can begin your targeting process with broader and wider categories, but eventually, you will have to narrow down and get more detailed data to achieve the best conversion rates.
When you set your target market, your decision must be based on thorough market research and audience research and not just an estimation. Data-driven decisions are the most reliable decisions that any business can make.

How can you fix your target audience based on audience research?

1. Gather and maintain data on all your current customers:
   You first must identify who is already/ currently purchasing the products or services of your business. This will help you reach out to more people who have similar purchase patterns like your existing customers.
   You may get valuable information depending on how a person connects to your business. Don’t add too many questions to your order or to your opt-in process or to your checkout page. This will only annoy your customers and make them abandon shopping carts, which will affect your customer retention immensely.
   But make sure to gather all the basic, ground-level, and relevant information about your existing customers that will help you track and follow trends and averages effectively.
   Such data, for B2C companies, would include the age, location, and time-zone, language, spending capability, purchase patterns, interests, and stage of life. For B2B companies, the data structure would vary a little. Collect information about the size of the businesses that are purchasing your products or services. You will need to have data about their titles and the members who are in charge of making the purchase decisions.
2. Have a thorough look at your website and social media analytics:
   Social media analytics helps fill all the leftover gaps in your customer analysis. They help you understand who all are interacting with your social accounts even if they are not among your existing customers.
   You need to study and understand all the analytics of all your social media accounts and pages that will include those on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Snapchat.
3. Study your competition:
   After you are well aware of who is already interacting with your business, and purchasing your products and services, you need to study your competition in the online market.
   When you take a look at the actions and whereabouts of your competitors, you can easily answer all the key questions like for example: Are your competitors targeting the market segments that are similar to yours? Are they reaching out to segments that you have missed out on? How are they going about positioning themselves in the market?
   Don’t expect to get detailed audience research about the audience who are interacting with your competitors, because that is practically not possible. But you can surely derive a general sense of the marketing approach they are using. You will understand whether their efforts are successful in creating online engagement for their brand.
   Market analysis helps you gain an in-depth understanding of which targets you must target and whether you are in the right direction or not.
4. Clearly show the value your product or service has to offer:
   This is the key point of differentiation between features and benefits that all marketers need to be aware of. You can display as many features you want but no consumer will be convinced enough to buy your product/ service until and unless you show them the benefits your product or service offers.
   The features of your product/ service show what it does, but the benefits are the results it generates. You need to display how your offering makes the consumer’s life easier or more interesting.
5. Come up with a market statement:
   Now is the ideal time for you to place everything that you have learned until this stage into a simple and easily comprehensible statement with which you can define your target audience.
   You have just begun to create a brand-statement. Try incorporating the most important demographic and behavioral characteristics while creating your target market statement.
   If you are selling multiple products or services, you will need to create a target market statement for every product/ service or every product/ service category.

Conclusion:

The results of your audience-targeting efforts are likely to give you several additional insights that you did not have before. Incorporate all that you have learned and revisit your statement regularly to remain in compliance with changing market trends and demands.