Who is your Audience?

You may as well be fumbling around in the dark with your marketing efforts if you don’t know who your target audience is. Determining your audience is a crucial step to ensure your marketing efforts are targeted to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Why you should find out who your ideal audience is

• Allows your marketing efforts to be more focused – determine which channels your business should use to increase the online presence of your business.
• Gain a greater understanding of your customers, including their needs and requirements.
• Maximise your chances of a higher return on investment (ROI) from your marketing.
• Keep up to date with changing markets.
• Produce more relevant content.
• Obtain a greater understanding of the decision making process for selecting your product or service.
• Helps you to determine your unique selling point, (USP).
• Concentrate your marketing efforts on conversions.
• Determine if there is enough demand for your product or service.
• Tailor your product or service to meet the needs of your market.

How to determine your target audience

• Examine your current customers – surveys can provide an insight into the profile of your customers.
• Examine what problems your service or product solves for your customers.
• Research – use existing analysis or carry out your own investigations, e.g. sales demographics and trends.
• Look at your competitors and what they are doing.



• Website statistics – analyse how people are discovering you and what your best performing content is.
• Create a customer profile – use your analysis to create a profile of your ideal customer.
• Examine your product or service offering to determine the benefits of your offering.
• Use different methods for determining a business to business (B2B) audience than you do for a business to consumer (B2C) audience – e.g. for a business identify industry, size of business, geographic location. For consumers consider age, income, occupation.

How to use this knowledge

• Link up your audience with the correct marketing channels – check that the demographics of people using social media channels matches the demographics of your audience.
• Timing – see my article on the importance of timing when releasing your content: Timing is Everything – When to Post your Content.
• Tailor your content marketing to your audience. Once you know who your ideal customer is you can use this knowledge to produce content focused on meeting the needs of your audience.
• Emphasise your unique selling point, (USP). Use the knowledge of your audience to highlight why people should use your business instead of the competition.
• Check that you have a sufficient market for your offering.
• Realise that it isn’t a static environment and you should be checking your audience on a regular basis, to ensure you keep up with market trends and stay ahead of the competition.

For assistance with determining your audience and how it can help your business grow, get in touch.