Digital Marketing: Your target audience
Posted on 27th May 2021 at 16:45
Knowing your target audience is vital if you’re to find success in your digital marketing efforts. It’s far easier to tailor your online content if you know who’s going to see it and what makes them tick.
Wouldn’t it be far better to market your sportswear brand to Kelly the 26-year-old athletics enthusiast, rather than Dave the 59-year-old craft beer nut? It might sound like oversimplifying the issue, but that’s essentially what it boils down to.
Why your target audience is important
Knowing your target audience will point you straight to the online platforms you should be utilising to best reach it, especially with social media, where users of different platforms can vary so widely - we’ve written more on that here.
Vitally, you’ll also be able to target paid ad campaigns more effectively at the demographics that matter to you, and make clearer decisions on the products, services and promotions you should offer moving forward.
Details and demographics
There’s a shedload of information you can find out about your customers – or potential customers – to inform these decisions. Digital marketing platforms and analytics tools can give you the location, age, gender, language, education level, marital status, and even the exact profession of those engaging with you online.
It goes deeper still. You can uncover the purchase intention of online users based on their online activity, interests, hobbies, or even the subcultures they belong to. It’s all very Big Brother, eh?
Finding your target audience
We realise we’ve been banging on about the what and the why, without really mentioning the how. So, how do you find this elusive target audience? Google Analytics, or similar tools like Facebook Insights, are absolutely central to figuring all of this out.
Those all-important details and demographics can be uncovered by using these tools to analyse your existing online traffic. They might seem like daunting walls of numbers at first, but the results are worth their weight in gold.
Social media engagement is another fantastic way to reveal your target audience. Talk with users, post polls, publish interactive content, and monitor hashtagged discussions to gauge the kind of person that has an interest in what your business is doing – or could be doing. If you’re feeling more direct, you might even send out a customer survey.
Plan your digital marketing strategy accordingly
You’ve analysed your traffic, surveyed your followers, and you’ve come out the other end with a list of demographics and interests. All that’s left now is to tailor your ads, your online content, and any other marketing activity to this specific type of person – or a buyer persona, to use another phrase common in marketing.
Speak directly to their interests, goals and the pain points that they’re looking to solve through a purchase. People are far more likely to respond to a business that offers a more personalised interaction, so get out there and reel ‘em in!
We're here to help
If analytics aren’t really your thing and you’re looking for help optimising your digital marketing, please do get in touch. We’d love to chat about how the Penguins can help your business to engage with its target audience.
Tagged as: digital marketing
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