How to Identify Your Target Audience
We already filled you in on some tools you can use to collect data about your marketing efforts. Indeed, having plenty of information at your fingertips will allow you to market your product or service more efficiently, but only if you know how to apply it. The first step is finding out what types of people are interested in your business — your target audience — and creating marketing content that appeals to them. That begins with identifying and segmenting your prospects by their niche as well as based on your marketing goals Here are a few tips from the team at TIC Digital Marketing about how to use your data to identify marketing segments and target audiences.
Understand Your Core Business — “Who Needs My Services?”
The first thing you need to do is figure out who you are as a business. You need to understand the differentiating features of your products or services and any strengths that motivate people to buy from you. What are you selling? Who is likely to need or want what you’re selling? The first step in identifying your target audience is analyzing how your solutions or services help these people. Ask yourself: what types of customers do you want to serve? Identify businesses with criteria like industry, service offerings, type of business, or size.
Segment Leads
Now it’s time to crunch the numbers. Segmenting leads is how you identify a specific group of potential customers within your target audience. If you’re marketing business to business, you may want to segment by company size, or you may want to identify individuals at those companies by job title. Here are three ways you can segment your leads:
Company size
To promote your solutions or services, you need to assess the company size you aim to cater to. This includes assessing the particular company’s number of employees or sales revenue.
Job Title
This segment is crucial to support your communication strategy. Considering individuals according to their job function rather than the entire company helps you create effective marketing campaigns. Promote your solutions or services by targeting the decision-makers and the influencers while segmenting them carefully for maximum impact.
Types Of Lead Magnets
Offer freebies, downloadables, and other incentives that interest your target audience in exchange for their email addresses or additional information. These lead magnets can be in the form of eBooks, webinars, downloadable guides, and a lot more.
Analyze Each Segment Separately
Analyze your segments individually, understand their desires, and use the resulting data to develop an effective strategy to target them. At the same time, also observe if the segments are large enough to justify the money and resources you plan to use.
Once you identify them, you can drill even deeper. Find out what kind of content they like to see and what has worked on them in the past. Now you can create content designed specifically to capture their attention!
Investing your time, efforts, and money to identify your target audience enables you to hone your brand messaging and promote your solutions and services effectively. This serves as a solid foundation for the growth of your business for the long term.
Identifying target audiences and market segments can prevent you from wasting your marketing dollars. With a little preparation up front, you can save big money in the future. Of course, not every business owner is a marketing expert, so we understand if you need a little help. Get in touch with TIC Digital Marketing today for assistance with identifying market segments and other inbound digital marketing services. Call (858) 280–3792, send an email to info@ticdigitalmarketing.com or fill out the online form on our contact page to find out more!
Action Plan
Take a moment to use what you’ve just learned in this post and apply it to your own marketing!
- What types of businesses do you want to work with? Consider things like business size, service offerings, industry, type of business, revenue, number of employees, and business maturity.
- From the list in Question 1, identify at least 3 job titles of the people you would work with at those types of businesses.
- For each job title you identified in Question 2, identify a few common pain points that people in these jobs experience. Make sure they’re pain points your business can solve!
