In the digital marketing world, understanding the audience for your product or service is key to growing your business. However, this can be a challenging task–but it does have its solutions. Read on to learn more about identifying your ideal audience and crafting the types of content they want.

Why Do I Need To Identify A Target Audience?

A target audience, by definition, is the people you’d like to engage with your content and then convert into clients and customers. At this point you may be thinking, I’ll just focus on making great content and the right audience will follow. While that can be true, great content only promises traffic–it doesn’t equal sales. 

On top of that, identifying your audience helps establish where you should be funneling your marketing budget–no one can afford to hit all digital and media channels with advertisements. By locating your niche in the market, you can create content that will produce a return on the money you invest in digital marketing advertisements. 

How Can I Identify My Niche Audience?

There are a number of tried and tested methods for establishing your target audience.

Current Customers

If you’re an established business, you already have a foundation of current customers. Use statistical analysis to dissect the demographics and then the psychographics of your current customers. These data points include identifying:

• – The demographics of your current customers

• – Where they buy from

• – What their common interests are

• – Which ones are return customers 

You can also look at the analytics on social media to see what posts they share, like, and comment on the most and use that information to inform your content creation as well.

Start From Scratch

If you’re a new business, or it’s just time to revamp your systems, follow these steps for establishing a target audience:

• Identify the features and benefits of your products/services and who would most likely use/benefit from them. 

• Create several user personas. These personas are meant to help you visualize who you’ll be writing for. They’ll include details such as:

– Gender

– Personality

– Family life

– Job title

– Job function

– Employer

– Location

– Income

– Needs

– Pain points

– Challenges

After you’ve finished analyzing your audience, make sure that your niches aren’t too similar–if one marketing message works for more than one niche, you’ve gone too far. 

What Should I Focus My Content On?

At the beginning of this article we mentioned that just having great content won’t get you the ROI you want–and that’s true. However, creating great content crafted towards the needs for your target audience is a surefire plan every time. The secret to having great engagement with your audience is writing the content that they want to read–ask yourself, what exactly would make them stop, click, and consume your content?

You don’t have to make this a guessing game either–return to what you know: utilize statistics to see what content has done well in the past, and conduct keyword research around your products to see what your customer base is also interested in.