How to find the target audience: 6 simple steps

Prologue

The B2B buyers often are bump into the question How to find the target audience?

According to HubSpot, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

When creating a buyer persona(s), the marketers should consider including customer demographics, behavioral patterns, motivation & goals.

The who is my target audience quiz & how to identify the target market are the questions that marketers need to find apt answers to before they define their niches & before they opt for modern targeting methodologies to segment & sub-segment their target audiences.

Adele Revella, CEO & Founder of Buyer Persona Institute, states, “The most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence. Unfortunately.”

If you’re continuously waning at your marketing endeavors or not making the best of your marketing tactics, consider reviewing the entire process that you’ve been using to find your target audiences.

Opting for proper strategies to answer how to identify target market have revamped the marketing strategies of many of the companies including the famous names such as Michael Kors which optimized their sales strategy throughout the economic recession using the tools to find their target audience.

Figuring out how to find the target audience & deploying proper steps to analyze & optimize the number of target audiences, helps B2B companies dive into their demographics & psychographic insights, to optimize lead generation by figuring out how to identify the target market & target maximum number of personas for improved sales conversions.

The following are some of the target market demographics examples & ways the marketers can use to find their personas on multiple channels across the web:

1. Understand the  Audiences via the Selling Points:

The marketers seeking the answer to how to find the target audience; need to start with the introspection of the purpose behind their products or services. They can as themselves important questions as the following:

• Describing what their products are & what problems do they solve
• List the diverse functionalities of the product lines & brainstorm what benefits the people can have from purchasing those products
• Lastly, marketers can question themselves which people experience those problems

2. Analyzing Existing Audiences:

The customers who currently purchase from your brand are your existing customers. Businesses need to learn about the characteristics & buying patterns of their audiences. Also, understanding the existing customers is imperative for understanding whether the marketers need to expand their persona bases or whether they can just make the sale to the existing groups of customers.

The following steps can prove beneficial for the marketers trying to comprehend how to find the target audience & for those you want to gain in-depth insights about their existing customers:

• Investing in customer relationship management (CRM) software:

CRM programs like Zoho or Insightly provide good features for the marketers to bank upon & delve deeper into their audiences. Major CRM platforms such as the one from Salesforce are excellent for engaging customers – deploying expert strategic management of your CRM to springboard its performance has several advantages.

• Identifying the demographics of your Customers & their Buying Patterns:

The geographic distribution of the existing customers, their age ranges, purchasing habits & other insights can be analyzed with the help of the analytical tools in the CRM

• Figure out the Past Success Patterns:

The marketers need to benefit from the list promotions or campaigns that have worked well for their companies in the past.

3. Employ Primary Research & Find the “Lookalike” or the “Mirroring Audiences”:

A target audience group for a group can have multiple layers of variety. Leveraging demographic insights & insights based on the firmographics, technographics, psychographics as well as those based on the “fit-data” helps marketers think more critically about whom they can sell their products to.

For those of you questioning: How to find the target audience, the answer can be hidden in expanding your exiting persona base. Figure out:

• All about the people who use the projects similar to yours

• Think more critically about the similar audience groups, in addition to your existing customers & figure all about the people who use similar products as you might have got at the disposal

• Set aside resources & deploy primary research to conduct in-house research:

Social Media channels provide a great opportunity to interact with the customers at a very cheap rate & make it convenient for the marketers to figure out the audience groups who have been reflecting the same researching & buying habits online, as compared to the ideal target persona.

4. Employ Social Listening: P.S.: Don’t Assume:

The worst thing done by businesses trying to figure out how to find the target audience is the assumption that they actually understand their customers. The assumption framed, maybe deteriorative to the health of the businesses & complacency can lead to the wrong persona targeting; which can be the game spoiler.

• Marketers must compare their selling point evaluation & their customer research

• They must research & identify the differences between what the primary research indicated & what their initial assumptions helped them figure out.

• The marketers can employ social listening to figure out the different customer motivations behind making specific purchases

• Also, for the marketers trying to comprehend “how to find the target audience” sentimental analysis of the existing & the prospective customers comes in handy for the creation of user-generated content (UGC), which further keeps their attention glued, improves their experiences for optimized conversions & draws in more customers which might be lookalike to your ideal personas & help in the expansion of your persona-base.

Learn more: The Philosophy of Social Listening

5. Competitive Benchmarking & A/B Testing of Your Campaigns & Social Media Strategies:

The marketers need to identify their competitors; they need to research what works best for their competitors & get inspired by their best practices. Accordingly, marketers can comprehend how to find the target audience & can articulate what makes their company different & can accordingly discover their audience & their gaps.

Test-running everything from the email campaigns to the social media campaigns, as well as the landing pages & figuring out which ones that work & which ones that fizzle helps the marketers in optimizing the total number of their ideal persona size.

Having dedicated models for social media management along with the other multi-channel attribution technics can be deployed by the marketers to optimize the experience of their existing customers along with attracting, engaging & converting an increased number of customers. There is an obvious increase in the size of your target audience.

Learn more: How a SoLoMo (Social, Local & Mobile) Content Strategy Aids B2B Marketing

6. Create an Audience Profile:  Segment & Sub-segment your Personas & employ machine learning (ML) algorithms such as K-means clustering:

Good customer profiles contain both the demographic as well as the psychographic information.

Additional information in the form of technographic, firmographic, “fit-data”, intent data as well as, the researching methodologies & mirroring habits of the prospects can help segment your ideal persons & can be the answer to How to find the target audience.

Segmentation & sub-segmentation of the prospects can be done for better & niche-specific targeting. The machine learning-based algorithms such as k-means clustering are used for developing specific audience clusters.

According to a blog by Alexa, targeting is core to marketing & marketers can sub-segment their persona size several times in order to optimize their marketing endeavors for sales conversions.

Wrapping Things Up

Amidst the evolving B2B landscape, marketers need to be evolving & futuristic. How to find the target audience is a question that ain’t easy to answer.

Nonetheless, for the marketers setting pace with the futuristic marketing approaches & keeping abreast with the wind of automation & the fourth industrial revolution (bought by the artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML)), finding target audiences in prudence & indulging them in streamlined buyer-cycle lifespans, finding ideal personas is an indispensable and regular schedule – provided the above strategies are taken into account for discovering, attracting, engaging with, converting & retaining the prospects as the brand advocates.

Having an omnichannel reputation management strategy & revisiting, auditing & expanding the ideal persona criterion can be of great help for marketers looking forward to optimizing their bottom-lines.

Valasys Media is a well-known name in the B2B marketing dominion deploying services such as lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services to help marketers optimize their core bottom lines.

Contact us for any help to optimize your marketing endeavors via tailored campaigns to improve your sales revenue.