ByWhether you want to market your company with inbound marketing, social media, outbound marketing or any other type of marketing, the first thing you need to do is to figure out your target audience. Your target audience is who you market to. Your target audience doesn’t care about who you are, what you do or what your product does. What they care about is how you or your product or service can help them solve their problems and perform better.
Before you start marketing you need figure out who your target audience are and what their likes and dislikes are, what keeps them up at night, what’s the best time and method to reach them by, etc.
With the internet and a little imagination you can perform research and find out all about your target audience with ease.
Below are a list of 6 methods and techniques, which can help you find out more about your target audience:-
1. Make use of Surveys:
Surveys can be a great tool to find out more about your target audience. You can send surveys directly to your target audience’s emails and find out a lot about them. Your survey can be a mixture of multiple choice questions and questions that require the reader to type in long answers. There are many free survey services like JotForm Survey Maker, Survey Monkey, Kwik Surveys, Free Online Surveys, etc. Some of these services are completely free and some of them require you to sign up for a plan to use all their features.
To encourage people to register and take part in the surveys, you can provide free coupons or small rewards to people who finish the surveys.
2. Make use of Social Media:
There are more than a billion users on social media like Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter. You can take advantage of these vast amounts of members and research your target audience. To learn how to research your target audience using social media, please read this post.
3. Use Your Imagination:
Fiction writers use their imagination, to develop their characters. You can do the same thing and find out more about your target audience. You could first picture your target audience and imagine what their life is like – what sort of a house do they live, what their lifestyle is like, how do they dress, etc. After you have imagined this, you can interview them mentally – you can ask questions like what do they like, what are they interested in, etc. in your mind. This actually works and will help you understand your target audience a lot better.
4. Interview Similar People:
If your target audience are busy decision makers of a company, interview some decision makers you know. These people could be your friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. The people you interview will lead similar lives to your target audience and this will help you understand them better. You can find out how busy they are, the best time to contact them, the best medium to contact them with, etc.
5. Interview Ad Agencies:
Advertising agencies normally have a lot of experience as they work with people from different backgrounds and different walks of life. You can find out more about your target audience by interviewing ad agencies that specialize in working with your target audience. They will be able to give you a lot of information about your target audience, you wouldn’t normally get anywhere else.
6. Research Your Competitors:
Research who your competitors are marketing to, and find out more about their marketing tricks and methods. This should help you find out what your target audience is and how you can reach and market your services and products to them better. I’m not asking you to spy on them, I am just asking you to take a brief look at their marketing methods
If you follow the above methods, you should be able to find out a lot about your target audience. This should make it easy for you to grab the attention of your target audience and convince them to buy your products or try out your services.
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Hope you find this post helpful. Do you use any other methods, to find out more about your target audience? I would really appreciate it if you could share them with us in the comments box below.
Mitt Ray is the CEO and Director of Social Marketing Writing and Imittcopy. He is also the author of the book Living With Ogres. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.
