For every large and small enterprise, the determination of their target audience is essential. Every strategy related to marketing, social media, etc. all depends on a business’s target audience.

In this post, I will include a list of ways to help you find the right target audience for your online business.

However, before beginning with the first one, let’s understand how your business will grow when you start targeting the right audience.

Why does it matter to know the right target audience?

As a customer, would you invest in a product that is of no use to you? Probably not, because that won’t be a profitable investment.

Similarly, if your brand starts targeting the audience that has no use of purchasing your product, then your annual profit would incur a significant loss.

For instance, when you advertise for adult diapers on Facebook, you would target senior citizens in the age group of 60 and above. However, if you target people who are younger than 50 or 60 years, you would not be investing your budget efficiently; plus, your ROI (Return On Investment) will also deteriorate.

Moreover, it will become hard for a business to operate if it doesn’t have a filtered audience to target; this is because (as previously informed) the target audience is the base of business planning from manufacturing cost to strategizing sales.

How to determine the right target audience for your business?

I am going to recommend 7 ways to find the right target audience for your business. 

1. Monitor ‘Audience’ In Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is the one-stop destination for every business which seeks valuable and actionable data about their website. So, if you are trying to decide your right target audience, you must start monitoring the ‘Audience’ section in Google Analytics.

The ‘Audience’ section includes information about the age, gender, location, and language of every visitor to your domain. The GA data can help you in identifying your target audience. Although you need to analyze it carefully.

For instance, if you are getting more visits from ‘men’ rather than ‘women’, then that tells you about the gender you should target. Similarly, you can identify the location and the age group as well.

2. Which Post Boosts Engagement and traffic?

To narrow down the target market even further, you should analyze the GA data on the basis of separate sub-domains (under the “Behaviour” section in GA).

For instance, you should inspect which sub-domain is getting the most traffic and engagement. Also, monitor the dynamics of the visitors coming in (their age, gender, location, and time spent).

This data gives you an idea about what type of posts caters to what kind of your audience. Based on that, you can formulate your marketing strategies.

3. Get Audience Insights from Social Media

Social media insights is another platform, like Google Analytics. It also has ample knowledge about your audience. Although, that data is only limited to your social media audience.

You can study your audience from ‘insights’ of several social media handles. You have Facebook and Instagram Insights, Twitter Insights, etc.; this data will help you know about your target market and how to run Social Media ads that generate impressive ROI (Return On Investment).

4. Analyzing Your Competitors

It is hard to come up with a new product, so by studying your competitors, you can identify the potential audience you can target; this is because your competitors are selling the same products as yours.

You can find out about your competitors' target market by thoroughly analyzing their website and their advertisements, and even subscribing to their email to get more insights. 

In addition to that, if you start looking at how they approach their target market, you will get the idea and improve your strategies accordingly.

Note: You can run a competitor analysis at zero-cost. You can use free tools like SEO IQ compare your website’s SEO with its top competitors and extract actionable ways to outrank them.

5. Interact with Your Users

With Google Analytics and Social Media Insights, you can get precise information about your audience. But to understand them and what they need or what content they like, you must talk to them.

You can interact with your audience through comments and participate in discussions on social media. Or you can gain knowledge about them through focus groups and personal interviews.

In this process, you need to show the audience your products and get their feedback on the same. By doing this, you can capture first-hand information about your target market.

6. Conducting Surveys to Gather Customer Data

Surveys are the most powerful way to gather data about your audience. They can help you decide your target market conveniently.

You can use the surveys to gather feedback about your product and services along with information related to age, gender, location, etc. Plus, these can help in extending your email list. You will get more subscribers to your blog along with an increased amount of traffic.

Other than that, you can run contests on social media platforms and achieve the same goal. Although you will have to entice the audience to participate with prizes.

Surveys can also help you in conducting research and develop specific content with appropriate sources to your claims.

7. Create Customer Personas

Your next step of understanding your target market is by creating their customer personas. The data collected from interviews, surveys, and the focus group, can help you generate customer personas conveniently, helping you make bigger audience buckets for your campaigns.

Over To You

Every point included in this post will help you in creating a target audience effectively. Apart from that, some of these ways can help you understand your target market and formulate better marketing strategies.

If you want to find and understand your target audience, you can refer to this post and do just that.

Also, can you think of any more ways to find the right target audience? If there are any, let me know about them in the comment section below.