If you are looking to scale your small business and scale your growth sustainably delivering the right message to the right target audience is key.
In our previous post about the 3 key metrics to grow you business, we mentioned our process for improving your conversion rate: Creative, Copy/Offer, Traffic, & Product. In this post we are focusing on the Copy/Offer.
Target Audience Definition
Your target audience is any group of customers who display similar characteristics or other identifiable traits that you can group.
When defining a target audience, it is important to consider the audience demographics of the visitors as well as where in the sale process your customer is.
To find your target audience demographics we want to think about factors such as age, gender, location, income level, lifestyle, etc.
To find the relevant content we need to look into where in the sale process your target audience is.
Identifying The Characteristics Of Your Target Audience
The first step is to define your target audience. The reason for doing this is to get rid of pre-conceived biases that you may have of who your target audience is. By understanding your target market you will be able to craft messaging for your marketing campaign that touches on your target audience's pain points.
To identify the characteristics of your target audience, you must conduct a target audience analysis to understand their needs and wants, as well as what motivates them.
A lot of these data points you can pull using Google Analytics. If you are not familiar with using Google Analytics. You don't need to be an expert to find this info.
Age: If you already have customers you can use Google Analytics to pull this age. We are looking for age ranges of about 10 years. Example Women in their 30's or men between 45 and 54.
Google Analytics -> Audience -> Demographics -> Age
Gender: Is your product gender-focused? You may be surprised when looking at the data.
Google Analytics -> Audience -> Demographics -> Gender
Bonus: Most social media platforms provide demographic data to help you find your target audiences. For example, with Facebook Business Manager I can go to Facebook Insights and find Age and Gender
Income / Education Level: Who is your product for and who is buying it? In the past, you were able to look up customers by education level on Facebook. However, with recent privacy updates, this has been removed.
A way around this is to use the zip codes of the states that your existing customers live in. Though not always the case you can infer that customers who live in wealthier zip codes have a higher likely hood of having a higher education level.
Then go to your audience report in Google Analytics and find your location report. Set the primary Dimension below your map to city. Scrolling down you will find cities sorted by most users.
Bonus: To choose your target market you will select the cities with high users (visitors) and high conversion rate. You can divide revenue by transactions to find AOV. Visitors, AOV, and Conversion rate are the 3 KPIs to drive any business forward.
Then using the Facebook Audience Insights report you can view what brands your potential audience members are interested in.
Go to Insights in Business Manager.
Then select Audience to view the brands your target audience is interested in.
Be sure to select the potential audience option in the top left to see top pages Facebook recommends you target.
By combining these two reports you can get a good idea of the Income and Education level of your target market.
Challenges: What are the pain points your target customer is encountering? The best way to find this is to collect data from your customers. This could come in surveys or polls.
Doing market research on all the above info will provide you with audience demographics on your target audience and allow you to create content with the right message for the right target audience.
Create Your Buyer Persona Based Off On Your Target Audience
Now that you have done all the tough market research on your target audience, the second step is to create a buyer persona.
An example you can copy is:
Male, will call him Joe. Joe lives in Denver and is in his 20's or early 30's. He is generally a hustler based on the Facebook pages he is following in audience insights. Probably graduated from college and went into a corporate job or small business, but left. Now has multiple projects going on, likes his independence, and is looking for information that can help him achieve his business goals.
This is the Blue Ocean Media customer persona. If this fits you. I'd love to talk with you.
That being said crafting something similar can help you understand and get into the mindset of your visitors and potential customers.
Identify The Purchase Intent Of Your Target Audience
The third step in your target audience research is to deliver the right message at the right time.
To do this we need to know where in the sales funnel your target demographic sit.
Are they first-time visitors who are only browsing or have they displayed purchase intent?
For example, first-time visitors may be browsing or simply considering whether to make a purchase, while customers who have displayed clear purchase intent are likely to be further along in the decision-making process and thus more likely to close the deal.
By understanding where each customer is in the buying journey, you can more effectively tailor your sales and marketing efforts toward closing deals and growing your business.
Which Social Media Platform Is My Targeted Audience On
Understanding what makes your target audience tick is crucial for effectively reaching and engaging with them. Now that you have defined your target audience demographics, created your customer personas and set up processes to determine purchase intention of your target audience. The fourth and final step is to find the right channel to message your audience.
Using Social Media To Reach Your Target Audience
One of the best ways to answer this question is to look at your competitors and see which channels they are using to message their audience.
Take a look at your competitor IG, FB, Tik tok accounts. How are they messaging on each channel?
You can also use tools like BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, and SEM Rush to see data on referral sources.
Example, below is from BuzzSumo. Using the free version I typed in Nordstrom and can see some of the most recent results. You can use this to search your competitors brand name. Who is writing articles or publishing content for them on Youtube in this case.
Reach out to those people and see if they can create similar content for you on those social media channels.
A Few Additional Tools To Research Your Target Audience
Look at your referral traffic in Google analytics
On the topic of Google Analytics this is a free tool that offers far more than just the audience demographics that were mentioned when putting together your demographic report.
You can use any of the traffic reports in Google Analytics to find what sites are sending visitors to your site.
Simply open Google Analytics. Acquisition -> All Traffic. Then click through any of the four reports listed below to learn more.
Send A Survey To Find Your Target Audience
A survey to current customers can help you identify the channels your target audience is using.
I like combining this with the Google Analytics report above. By looking in GA I can find data on where my website visitors are coming from. Then use the survey tool to confirm any initial suspicions I may have.
There are many article you can read through that can provide you with a good walk through of how to create a survey. For the purposes of this post and messaging your current audience....
Include any questions that you can look up in GA. This means
What is your age.... provide a range?
Gender?
Both questions we know we can look up in GA. You can probably come up with more.
The reason we do this is to confirm the survey data with GA data to give us two points of reference for our decision making.
Final Word On Setting Up Your Target Audience
Defining your target audiences is not a one time project. Over the course of your businesses lifetime you will want to check up on your audience data to make sure it stays current.
By checking in though you will ensure that you are always delivering relevant campaigns to the correct audiences.
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