Want to create engaging content, launch effective marketing campaigns, build best-selling digital products and, ultimately, earn money as a creator? Then you’ll need to understand your target audience.
Finding and understanding your target audience is one of the keys to becoming a successful content creator. Getting inside your audience’s head helps you create content, products, and marketing campaigns that better suit your audience’s needs and, well, earn you more money. And who doesn’t want that?
In this article, we’re showing you how to find your target audience, as well as outlining all the great benefits of doing so. We’re also providing you with a handy Target Audience Templates Bundle, filled with writing prompts and fillable tables that help you dig deep into your audience’s pain points and needs in just a few minutes.
Ready to meet your target audience? Get our Target Audience Templates Bundle now — for free.
What is a target audience?
Before diving into the “how-to,” let’s lay a little bit of ground work and unpack just what a target audience is.
A target audience is the specific group of consumers most interested in, most likely to purchase, and most likely to benefit from your product and service offerings. A target audience is a narrower segment within a target market and is characterized by specific demographics, psychographics, interests, and behaviors.
Target audiences are key factors in the marketing strategies of creators and companies alike, and influence decision-making when it comes to content marketing, advertising, and product development. These groups determine where creators will advertise, what kind of content they’ll create, and what kinds of products they’ll build.
Target market vs. target audience
If you’ve spent any amount of time navigating the creator economy, you’ve likely come across the terms “target market” and “target audience”. While both terms share some similarities, it’s important to note that they’re not interchangeable. There are actually quite a few key differences between them.
In terms of commonalities, both terms refer to a group of people who are interested in your products and services. While a target market is a broad group of all the people you think will be interested in your brand and offering, your target audience is a specific subset of that larger market. For example, your target audience might be women between the ages of 30 and 40, while your target audience might be stay-at-home moms living in metropolitan areas between the ages of 30 and 40.
Your target market influences your business and marketing decisions at a high-level, whereas your target audience is the focus of individual marketing campaigns. Because target audiences affect more granular marketing decisions, it helps to be as specific as possible when finding and defining them. In other words, the clearer you can get on your target audience, the more effective your marketing efforts will be.
Benefits of finding your target audience
- Hone your brand identity
- Create an effective marketing strategy
- Get more customers
- Boost brand loyalty
Understanding your target audience is one of the keys to success as a creator. Knowing who you’re talking to has tons of benefits when it comes to building your brand, creating your offering, and honing your marketing strategy. Let’s dive into them.
Hone your brand identity
Knowing your target audience enables you to create a brand identity that speaks directly to their beliefs and values. In other words, this helps you build a brand that resonates with the people you want to reach.
Create an effective marketing strategy
Successful marketing campaigns start with a well-defined target audience. Why? Because it’s all about messaging. If you understand your audience’s core values, you can create messaging that’s meaningful to them.
Get more customers
Acquiring new customers becomes easy when you know who you want to reach. By knowing your target audience, you’ll be able to tailor your brand and messaging towards their interests and preferences so they’ll take notice of — and purchase — your products.
Boost brand loyalty
A strong brand whose messaging and marketing resonates with its target audience’s values inspires brand loyalty. And this, in turn, inspires customers to stick with your brand and make recurring purchases, ultimately earning you more.
3 Different types of target audiences
There are a few different types of target audiences. What does that mean? When we say “types” of target audiences, we’re talking about the ways that you can segment your audience into smaller groups and define them using specific categories, including:
Type 1: Purchase intention
This refers to a group of people who are looking to buy about a product or service like yours, and are actively collecting information before taking the plunge.
This group is a great one to target in your marketing efforts, because they already have the intent to make a purchase — all you need to do is give them a little push in the right direction.
By understanding more about this group, you can better target your messaging to provide them with all the information (and incentive!) they need to finally tap that “Buy Now” button. This includes highlighting the product benefits most relevant to them and differentiating your product from competitors’ in a way that’s meaningful to them.
Type 2: Interests
You can also segment your audience by interest. This, of course, means understanding what your audience is into, including their likes and hobbies.
Knowing your audience’s interests enables you to uncover buyer motivation and buying behaviors, and helps you forge a more personal connection with your audience and engage with them on a deeper level.
For example, say you’re a fitness creator and you discover that a large subset of your audience loves to travel. In this case, you might want to offer on-demand fitness videos (if you aren’t already!) and market them as an easy way to stay fit while vacationing.
Type 3: Subculture
Subcultures are groups of people who share unique experiences, interests, and preferences. Think folk music fans, foreign film lovers, or vintage furniture enthusiasts. Many people define their identities through subcultures and, therefore, have a very strong emotional connection to these groups and experiences.
As a creator, you can tap into subcultures to forge a personal connection with your audience and foster a dedicated customer base.
BuzzFeed is a great example of a company tapping into different subcultures through their content marketing. This media company had a number of different YouTube channels that each cater to a different subculture, from Tasty Home for foodies to BuzzFeed Multiplayer for gamers.
How to find your target audience in 6 steps
- Determine the value of your products and services
- Compile data on your current customers
- Use social media data
- Conduct market research
- Search for niches
- Create customer personas
Now that you know all the benefits of understanding your target audience and the types of target audiences that exist, it’s time to learn how to find your own!
Below, we’ve broken down the process into six easy steps, from market research to creating your target audience statement.
Want to make the process even easier? Get our Target Audience Templates Bundle now for free.
Step 1: Determine the value of your products and services
The first step of audience targeting is determining the value of your digital products and services offering. The goal here is to identify who will most benefit from them — and this means determining their benefits.
This step comes down to differentiating your product’s features and benefits. Your product’s features are what it does and its benefits are the results gained from it. Sure, it’s totally easy to list your product’s features (they’re discrete and pretty evident). However, you’ll need to be able to explain its benefits to clinch those sales.
Remember, consumers purchase products and services that are marketed to solve their pain points. By getting clear on your product’s specific benefits, you’ll not only improve your targeted marketing strategy, you’ll learn more about your target audience’s needs and challenges.
3 tips to define your product offering’s value
Here are three simple tips for determining your offering’s value:
- Determine what problem your digital products or services solve. To figure out the benefits or your digital product, begin by asking yourself questions like, “How does my product improve my customers’ lives?” “How does it make their lives easier?” or “How does it make their lives more enjoyable?”
- Identify who’s most likely to benefit from the solution your products or services provide. Think about what kinds of people have the pain points and challenges that your products or services solve. For example, if you’re a fitness creator offering on-demand online fitness courses, then your ideal customer might be busy professionals or stay-at-home mothers who don’t have time to go to the gym but want to fit a workout into their hectic schedules.
- Define your unique selling proposition. Your USP is a statement that expresses why your product is better than the competition. This marketing tool should convey your product’s unique benefits and how it solves your audience’s pain points.
Stumped on your offering’s value and benefits? Consider asking your existing audience directly. You can use email surveys or social media polls to ask existing customers how they’ve benefitted from your digital products or services. Their answers are incredibly valuable in this stage of research and might even surprise you, revealing benefits that you hadn’t even considered!
Step 2: Compile data on your current customers
Already have a customer base? If so, a great first step in finding out who most wants to buy your digital products and services is to identify who’s already purchased them. Once you’ve got a handle on the defining features of your existing audience, you’ll be able to target others just like them to expand your pool of prospective customers and grow your cash.
If you have a base of paying customers, then you’re already naturally acquiring data about your audience and likely have more than enough data to start pinpointing your target audience.
So, where can you find this data? It depends on what tools you’re using to engage your customers. The most convenient place to find this data is on your online storefront’s customer analytics dashboard. If you use any additional tools like CRMs, UTMs, or Google Analytics, you’ll also want to use these to compile even more information on your audience.
Some of the key data points you’ll want to search for are:
Age range
How old is your customer base? You don’t need to get pinpoint precise here (i.e. splitting hairs over 32 vs. 34 year-olds.) Rather, you’ll want to determine the generation or decade-of-life of your current customer base. This is because the needs and goals of consumers within a single generation (about a 10 to 15-year age range) are quite similar, and those of each generation differ from each other quite a bit.
Location and time zone
Where is your current customer base located? The internet has globalized business. That means that, if you run an online business, your current audience could be located pretty much anywhere in the world.
Determining where your audience is located helps you figure out which areas to target with your marketing campaigns. It also helps you determine when you should schedule your social media marketing campaigns based on their time zone for the highest visibility.
Buying power and behavior
Buying power refers to a consumer’s ability to make a purchase based on how much money they have, while buying behavior refers to the decision process behind making a purchase.
To collect information on these two data points, you’ll want to analyze how much your current customers are spending on your products and how they approach purchasing your products.
Other data points to consider
Other data points to consider include:
- Language(s)
- Interests
- Pain points
Wondering which other data points to consider in your research? We have a template for that!
Our Target Audience Templates Bundle is filled with writing prompts and fillable tables that tell you exactly which data points to collect during your research, saving you tons of time so you can find your target audience today.
Interested? Grab our Target Audience Templates Bundle for free now.
Step 3: Use social media data
In addition to customer data, social media analytics are also a great way to learn even more about your target audience. Depending on the social media platforms you use, your social analytics dashboard can provide you with insightful demographic information about the people who are engaging with your content.
While your social media followers might not (yet!) be paying customers, they’re still people who are interested in your brand, business, and products. In other words, they’re the kind of prospective customers you’ll want to target.
Beyond your analytics dashboard, you can collect psychographic information on your social media audience by reading your DMs and comments sections (where followers frequently vent their pain points). You can also check your mentions and tagged posts (or use social listening) to find out who’s talking about you and your digital products on social media platforms — regardless of whether they’re following you or not.
Step 4: Conduct market research
After you’ve found out who’s engaging with your brand and products, you’ll want to see who’s interacting with your competition. In other words, it’s time to do some market research — and, particularly, some competitor research.
This research will help you understand which market segments your competitors are targeting, how they’re going about it, and whether their efforts are successful. To do this, you’ll want to check out and analyze your competitors’ social media followings, comments sections, and marketing campaigns. While you won’t be able to gather detailed information about your competitors’ target audiences, you’ll be able to get a good idea of the market segment they’re targeting.
This kind of research can help you figure out whether your competitors are targeting the same market segments as you, and whether they’re targeting segments that you hadn’t even considered.
Step 5: Search for niches
Next, it’s time to narrow your audience down into specific market segments. Remember: your target audience is a smaller segment of your larger target market. So, in this step, you’re segmenting your market into subsets to define your target audience (or target audiences).
To do this, you’ll need to go over all the data you collected in the previous two steps and search for distinct niches. These are groups of people that share similar characteristics. Look for patterns in the data you collected, and group together individuals that share psychographic and demographic information, as well as pain points, interests, and values.
You’ll want to make sure that these groups are moderately sized relative to your market — if they’re too small, they likely won’t be lucrative, while if they’re too big and broad, they may be harder to target.
So, guess what? These groups are your target audiences! You’ll use them to create your customer personas in the final step.
Step 6: Create customer personas
Finally, you’ll use the data from the target audience groups you made to create customer personas.
A customer persona is a detailed profile of one of your ideal target audiences. You can think of them as vivid portraits of fictional people that include narratives about their needs, goals, and behaviors.
Remember what we said earlier about your target audience being only a subset of your target market? It’s common for creators and businesses to define multiple target audiences, with different target audiences informing different products in their offerings and campaigns in their marketing strategy. If you’ve found and defined multiple target audiences during your research phase, you’ll want to write a customer persona for each one.
A customer persona is usually presented in a single-page document that includes detailed, narrativized information about a customer’s goals, behaviors, pain points, interests, attitudes, and more.
Don’t know where to start writing? Our free User Persona Template walks you through planning and creating your customer personas, and even provides you with helpful examples to use as models while you’re writing.
Want to write your own customer persona in just a few minutes? Get our User Persona Template for free now.
Build the digital products your target audience wants
Now that you know how to find your target audience (and you’ve downloaded our handy template to help you out), itโs time to put that knowledge to use. Yup! That means itโs time to start using your customer personas to create the digital products and services that they’ll want to buy.
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Further reading
- How To Create a User Persona (Tips + Free Template)
- How To Find Your Coaching Niche (Tips + Free Templates)
- How To Create a Life Coaching Business Plan (+ Free Templates)
- How To Sell Digital Products Online: A 6-Step Launch Checklist
- 15 Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online (+ Real Examples)
- How to Price Your Digital Products for More Sales
- How To Promote Your Digital Products: 10 Ways To Boost Sales
- How To Make Passive Income Selling Digital Products
- How To Create a Podcast Business Plan (+ Free Template)