How to Find and Target Your Online Audience

The better you understand your target market, the more you’ll be able to focus your messaging and reach the audience most likely to convert into customers.  Developing a clear understanding of your online audience may be the most important thing you do as a digital marketer. Your target audience informs all elements of your digital marketing strategy.

Audience research helps identifying specific group of people you want to reach with your channels. They are the people who are most likely to be interested in your content, products, or services. They are likely united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviours. Audience research also helps you craft relevant content, messaging, and campaigns. All of this can lead to higher conversion rates and better ROI. Of course, these are key metrics for all digital marketers.

Online audience research isn’t complicated. It’s mainly about narrowing your focus while expanding your reach. We’ve created free online audience research ideas to help you keep track of all the information you learn as you conduct your research.

1. Compile data on your existing customers

Who most wants to engage with you online? Start with the people already buying from you, following you, and interacting with your posts. Some data points you might want to consider are:

Age: You don’t need to get too specific here. Focus on learning which decade of life your online target audience is in, or their generation.

Location (and time zone): Where does your online audience live? This helps you understand which geographic areas to target and when you should schedule your social ads and posts to ensure best visibility.

Language: What language does your target audience speak? Don’t assume it’s your language. And don’t assume they speak the dominant language of their current physical location.

Spending power and patterns: How much money does your target audience for online sites have to spend? How do they approach purchases in your price category? Do they have specific financial concerns or preferences you need to address?

Interests:  What does your target audience like to do? What type of content do they follow, like or share? What other businesses do they interact with?

Challenges: What pain points is your social media audience dealing with?

Stage of life: Does your online target audience include college students? New parents? Parents of teens? Retirees?

Business to Business (B2B) companies should also consider:

Size of business: What kinds of businesses buy from and engage with you? Are they start-ups or enterprise-level brands?

Who tends to make the buying decisions: Are you targeting the CEO? The CTO? Marketing Manager? Procurement Manager?

2. Use social listening to find conversations about your brand on social media

Social listening is a key way to uncover conversations about your business, your industry, and your products. Monitoring relevant keywords and hashtags reveals what people are saying about you and your competitors online, even when you’re not tagged.

Reaching out in response to these social posts is a great way to find your target audience on social media, even if they’re not yet following you.

You can also use social listening for deeper social media audience research. As you monitor keywords and hashtags, you may uncover other relevant hashtags your audience uses. You can then test adding these hashtags to your social posts to extend your reach to more relevant users.

3. Research which channels or platforms your audience uses

Now you have a sense of who your audience might be and what they’re talking about online. So it’s time to find out where they already spend their time online. There are a couple of tools you can use to find this information.

4. Check out the competition

Odds are, your online audience overlaps with that of your competitors. So it’s worth checking out what they’re doing so you can benefit from the lessons they’ve already learned. Are they reaching segments you hadn’t thought to consider? How are they positioning themselves?

5. Understand what your target audience wants from your social channels

First, you need to make sure you have a rock-solid understanding of how your product or service makes your audience’s life: better, easier or just more interesting. Does it solve their challenges? Address specific pain points? Help them meet their goals?

Finally, start to think about how you can create value for your audience through your platform or channels. Below are some key questions to consider:

– What are your audience’s main purchasing barriers, and how can you help overcome them?

– Where are your followers at in their buying journey? Are they researching or ready to buy? Looking for reviews?

– What kind of content does your audience tend to engage with?

We hope you find this information valuable to start opening your business up to the online market. If you are looking to break into the digital marketing, there is no better time than now. Reach out to us for a free consultation.

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