How to Effectively Target Your Audience

The Problem:

New convenient forms of technology like smart phones and tablets have drastically changed the consumer’s attention span. This is because the amount of information that they are inundated with daily makes it difficult for consumers to figure out which they should attend to.

Your post is just one amongst hundreds of thousands of statuses, tweets, and posts that people will scroll through everyday. It could be the wittiest, most insightful post ever, but if you’re not targeting it to the right audience, you won’t get the recognition you’re seeking. 

How it affects you:

How are you supposed to get people to notice you when they’re so caught up with their various news feeds? You need to stick out from the crowd to get their attention!

How do you stand out from the crowd?

Your ideal customers are out there! You just have to find them, and show them all the wonderful things you have to offer them!

The Solution:

You need to identify your specific audience.

The first step to identifying your audience is to figure out what their demographic is. This will include their age, location, and gender. Sometimes it may even be useful to identify their home ownership and/or employment status.

The second step is understanding their needs. This can include anything from needing a new lawnmower, to finding a sexy single in their area. If it’s the latter, you’ll probably have to pay special attention not to make your ads look like pop-up viruses.

The third and final step to identifying your audience is to profile their behaviour. You should be able to make educated assumptions about the way that certain people will respond to certain content. For example, online memes and pictures of people embarrassing themselves are more likely to appeal to a younger, male crowd, whereas cooking videos and tips on removing stains are more likely to appeal to middle aged housewives.

Figuring out who your customers are likely to be, and what makes them tick gives you a better idea of their buyer persona. Perhaps you could conclude that females aged 18-24 are more impulsive buyers, or that men aged between 20 and 40 are likely to do a lot of research before buying a new car. Buyer personas can make it all the more easy for you to ensure that what you offer them has value, and can potentially fulfil a need, or solve a problem for them. You can then take each segment of your audience and find ways to target them closely, and potentially, individually.

Understanding these kinds of details about your target market will help you to determine what kind of strategies to implement and where. This is because different social media platforms, and different online spaces are occupied by different audiences.

Facebook can offer you a special service where if you’ve accumulated a database of emails, they can take those emails off your hands and find these people on Facebook. Firstly Facebook will make sure that your ads are seen by all of these people. And secondly, Facebook will use information about these people to find people who are similar to them, like their age, location, and interests. ————————–This is called retargeting, and it allows you to broaden your audience, but also to make sure that the people seeing your ads are actually people who would be interested in your product or service. Similarly, you can use LinkedIn to target people with specific roles, job titles, or areas.

Other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest all tend to appeal to specific age groups. For example, Tumblr targets the very elusive minds of ‘tweens’ and young adults, whereas Pinterest tends to focus on women aged 20-60. So keeping this in mind, you should be able to figure out which would be most suited to the audience that you’re looking to find.

It’s important to realise that just because you’re putting good, persuasive information out there, it doesn’t mean the right people are going to see it. Being able to utilise all of this information will help you to devise that plan where you are able to find who you’re looking for, and provide them with quality content that they’ll enjoy.

via