3 Ways to Identify Your Target Audience in 2022

When you try to appeal to everyone, it’s difficult to make the strong connections that lead to long-term customers. Because you aren’t focusing on a specific group of people, you can’t tailor your branding or messaging to speak directly to these prospects and customers—which makes it less likely that they’ll feel invested enough in your brand to stick around.

Instead, you need to identify a particular niche or group of potential customers that you’re going to target––in other words, your target audience.

Your target audience (sometimes also called a target market) is the unique group of prospects that you’re going to focus on connecting with and, ultimately, selling to.

Typically, your target audience should be relatively small. Rather than naming everyone you run into on the street, your target market should all have something in common. This could be an age group, income level, location, job title, gender, behaviors––or any combination of factors.

In fact, the more detailed your target audience is, the better.

Get to know your current audience.

If you want to know who wants to purchase from you, the best place to look is at who is already buying from you. (That is assuming you already have some customers. If you’re just getting started, you can skip this step––we’ll get to you shortly!)

Gather demographic (age, gender, race, location, etc.) and psychographic (personality, values, interests, etc.) data about your current customers

Think benefits not features

Steve Pritchard of Orlando Villa Holidays says, “The best way to work out which consumers to target is to identify who has a need or interest in your product or website and then begin narrowing it down from there. Start by pinpointing all of the different features and qualities of your offering, then have a think about who would benefit from these features.

If it’s a blog or website, this might be having specialist knowledge in a niche area, having a trusted and unbiased perspective, or a special widget that makes your site easy to use and find information from.

Turn Your Audience Insights Into Detailed Customer Personas

Building out customer personas is a way to easily digest all of the market research and audience insights you uncovered. This can go all the way down to creating a specific character or characters – such as Enterprise Ed or Small Business Sally – which personifies all of the key traits and characteristics of your target audience.