How To Define Your Target Audience in 6 (EASY) Questions

Key Takeaways

Are you struggling to Are you struggling to identify or understand your target audience? Well, in this video, I'm going to give you six questions to ask to understand your target audience. The great news is that having a really good understanding of your target audience and precisely matching your message to what they want to hear ridiculously makes any ads that you're running much more effective and it also transforms the performance of your website. So, stay tuned. Ever had that question? Usually from a smmy business consultant or maybe even your marketing company. They say, "Who's your target audience?" And you're like, "Damn, I should know this." Well, that ends today. By the end of this video, you're going to have a very good answer for that question. And the thing is, it's not actually your fault. If you had a physical shop that people walked in, then obviously you'd be meeting and you'd be talking to your customers every single day. But if we're doing a lot of our business through the website and through email, actually, it's very easy to become misaligned with the target customer or not really understand who our target customer is at all. But the danger is that without having a really tight match between your message and your customer, you risk your marketing not being as effective as it should be. So deeply understanding your target audience is key. Now, before I give you the questions to ask to narrow down and understand your target audience, you might need to do some brainstorming just to find your target audience in the first place and get yourself kind of familiar with what they're like. So, there's a few different ways that you can do this. The first way is to do some good old-fashioned Facebook stalking. Yes, that's right. You can go and find your customers on Facebook and do a bit of stalking to learn about what their lives are really like. So, have a look at their family situation. what sorts of house they live in, what do they spend their time doing, what are their interests. What we really want to do is be able to profile our target customer as well as we can our own friends so that you know if someone asks you about your friend and they say, "Oh, would she like this for Christmas?" You're like, "No, she really wouldn't like that." We need that kind of match with our target customer. Obviously, your customers can have lots of different personality types, but we need to hopefully each of your customers is going to have different personality types rather than one customer with all the personality types. But we really do need a good level of understanding about what our target customer likes and doesn't like. Another great place to do some audience research. And one of the methods that our content team uses to research a target customer is to go on to Reddit and have a look at the sort of people that are asking questions about your product or service or problem that you solve. Reddit's an absolute gold mine for people that feel completely at ease asking questions in their own language. And you can often have a look at the different types of language between those that are asking the question and those that are answering the question to see if there's any mismatch or misunderstanding. It's a great place to do some audience research. But above all, my absolute favorite way to do audience research is to phone them. Yes, that's right. Nothing beats picking up the phone and talking to your customers to find out what they are like. What we'll sometimes do is send out an Amazon voucher in return for a 15, 25 minute, 35 minute call with a group of customers. And what we're trying to do on that call is to understand what their lives are actually like. So we're not just asking questions about the business like how did you find us or what made you choose us or how would you pitch us to someone like you, but we're also looking to understand more about their life in general. So what keeps them awake at night? What are they worried about in the future? What do they most look forward to? What are their favorite things to do? What do they do when they're not buying your product or service? Now, as you do a bunch of these calls, you'll begin to pick out commonalities between each of your target customers. And it really helps you build this kind of mental image of your target audience, which is really exactly what you want to do. Okay. So, you've done a bit of research or you've spoken to your customers in the past, you've met them at shows or whatever, and you've got a bit of an idea. So, how do you then start to categorize and define this perfect target customer? What we really want is actually to be able to make generalizations about your target customer so that we can visualize them as a single person or a few single people. What we don't want to do is think of our target audience as a group of people because we then allow ourselves to be a bit blurry about the details. So, it's much better to be very specific about the characteristics of your perfect customer, knowing that you're also going to attract people that are kind of around the outside of that character as well. The first question to ask is, how old is your target customer? Now, this might feel like a bit of a surface question to ask and like it doesn't really have much relevance, but actually it can be really important because to a large extent, this can define how you reach that person. So, for example, if you're targeting an older demographic, you're not going to be on Tik Tok, right? Obviously, there are some really basic audience targeting stuff here. If you're targeting 75 year olds, you're not going to spend your time marketing on Tik Tok, for example. But as well as that, we've also got the life stages and the different needs that people have at different stages of their lives. This has a lot of importance for the sort of messages that you use in your marketing. Say, for example, that you're targeting professionals in their 20s. A lot of your messaging might want to be about proving yourself and earning your stripes and showing those around you that you're valuable and that you can do something. Whereas, if you're targeting professional people later in their careers, you might have a very different message about making things easier or whatever. Now, obviously, I'm making massive generalizations here, and you'll really need to understand your target audience to be able to make those for your customer, but the point is you do want to have a good idea of how old your customer is. One great example is a dental client that I remember having a conversation with a few years ago and they just had a website built by a company and they said, "You know what? One thing that really doesn't work for us is the images that we're using on the website." Because this business specialized in dental implants and a lot of dentist websites are pretty much just young, happy people with perfect teeth. The trouble is that's not the target audience for dental implants. Dental implants are predominantly sold to older people. So because the images on the website didn't match the target audience, that website was actually underperforming because the target audience arrived on the site and said, "That's not me, so this website's not for me." And they left. So you really want to make sure that there's a good match between your audience's age and the images that you're showing on your website and also the sorts of messages that you're sharing in your marketing. Question number two is, where does your perfect customer live? Now, there's all sorts of subtleties to this question, but one of the main reasons that you want to understand this is for ad targeting and improving the performance of the adverts that you're running. For example, you might be able to focus your ads on one particular city or one particular area where you know your target audience is right there. And by not targeting your ads in other areas, you can save budget to put into this really productive area. For example, we have a client that sells high-end men's shoes, and we've had a lot of success with them targeting particular streets and areas in London. We've targeted higher income bracket areas and areas where people are more likely to have more disposable income because that's just where their customers live. So, understanding where your customers live can be a good way of saving your ad budget and focusing it on the people that are most likely to buy. Now, question number three is a potentially contentious one, but what's your customer's most common gender? A reason I say this is potentially contentious is that many businesses don't feel like actually they have a gender bias. Now, often, you know, if you're selling women's underwear, for example, no, that's not even a good example. It's fairly common for a business to say, "We don't really have a gender bias." because actually they don't think that there's any reason that either men or women would want to buy from. But actually if you look at the analytics and you look at the data behind the purchases often that can tell a very different story. So here you can see the traffic for this particular client site. So we started working with them um in October which is when they've seen this kind of gradual steady increase in sales. And this product sells gifts for children. And what's really interesting about this is you can see the different gender split here. So we've got females. Now females account for 77% of all of the traffic to the website. So we might think that actually this business is really really focused on females. But if we look over here, we'll actually see that females convert half as well as males do. So although females make up 3/4 of the traffic to the site, actually they only make up 60% of the sales and 40% of the sales are made up by men. So men are more likely to convert when they're on the website. Now, there's all sorts of possible reasons for this, but what we really need to understand and what this business needs to understand is who is making the buying decision, who is making the research decision, because the content and the imagery on the site might need to be adjusted according to who is making purchases here. Now, obviously, we never want to exclude anyone. And I'm not saying that you should be targeting one type of person or another or you should be excluding anyone in your marketing at all. What we really need to be careful to do though is have a look at what's the reality with the purchases on our website and make sure that our marketing reflects that. Question number four is how do you promote to your target audience? And this is really about the sort of advertising methods and messages that are going to be most effective to them. For example, if you're targeting people that have a very long decision process, they need to see something a lot before they make a decision to buy. That might mean that things like remarketing and retargeting adverts could work really well for you because they will constantly see that ad throughout their kind of decision-m process. Whereas, if you're selling products that are very kind of impulse purchaseled, well, that's going to mean that actually you probably want to pay higher cost per click, well, that's going to mean you actually might want to pay more for new traffic to your website. knowing that if this is a very impulse-led audience or you're selling a product which is very impulsefriendly, then you just really want that person on the website as soon as they think about that thing and you're willing to pay a high cost per click on Google ads, for example, to get them there because once they come on, they're much more likely to buy. If your audience is doing a lot of research and they're comparing different options, then you might want to consider running ads to anformational page like a blog post or a buyer guide and then retargeting people that have been on that page because we're not expecting someone to convert the first time. So really what we want to do is get them on our website so that we know they're going through that decision process and then you can retarget your ads to them so that when they're ready to buy they see an ad for you. Another way of thinking about this is if your audience have some kind of cynicism about the purchase. For example, with Exposure Ninja, we work with a lot of businesses that have worked with a digital agency before and had a horrendous experience. So, when they come to us, they're like someone who's just had a really messy breakup. So, they're really hurt. They're really wounded and they're very skeptical about entering into a relationship in case that happens again. So, what we need to do with people is build a lot of trust by showing testimonials and case studies. So, what we need to do is build trust with people by showing testimonials, case studies, and other forms of social proof to reassure them that actually this is going to be okay. We're good at what we do. And finally, you might want to think about the time of day and day of the week that people are most likely to be interacting with your business because you might be able to save yourself a lot of ad spend by turning off your ads during the times of day and days of week that you're getting traffic, but you're not necessarily getting conversions. Question five to identify your target audience is where do they spend their time online. There's kind of three different categories here. We really want to know which social network your target audience spends their time on. So what you can do here is you can look for groups if you're on Facebook which are about your topic or for people that have your need. If you're looking on Instagram, you can look for theme pages. So are there theme pages dedicated to serve the sort of customers that you're going after? We also want to think about the different publications that your target audience spends their time reading. So for example, do they read online magazines? Do they follow bloggers? Do they read newspapers? And then the final category of where they spend their time online is particular influencers that they follow. So it's a good idea to survey your customers and just ask them who do you follow online? And you're not necessarily even looking for people that are thought leaders in your space. You're really just trying to build up an understanding of who your audience follows. For example, we know that actually quite a large percentage of our audience is familiar with Grant Cardone. Now, Grant Cardone has a very different style to us here at Exposure Ninja, but it's really interesting to know that Grant Cardone and Exposure Ninja do share a bit of an audience because that tells us about some of the traits and the characteristics that our target market looks up to. 10X, baby. And do feel free to send all of your life savings through to me, timing.com. The final question to answer for your target audience is what type of content works best for them. The danger is that we think whatever the type of content that we like to put out is going to be the best for our audience. Well, it's pointless writing really in-depth, detailed blogs if your target audience is 16y olds, right? Cuz they're just going to be on YouTube. So, does your audience respond best to text? either long- form posts like medium articles and guides or short form blogs or do they respond best to video? And if it's video, how long? What are their preferences? Again, check the influencers that they follow. And also, don't be afraid to just ask them, "Hey, when you're looking for videos on YouTube, how long do you like these to be?" I did this with our audience just today, in fact, and they said, "10 minutes, Tim." So, hopefully this video will be exactly 10 minutes. What sort of social posts do they like? Are they really busy? If they're really busy, they might not have time to check into stories every day. But they might be looking through main Instagram posts, for example. But if they're not that busy, they might be checking into social multiple times per day. So, if you can drip feed little bits of content for them, that might work really well and help you keep top of mind. So, I hope you found that useful, and I hope that you spend some time going through those questions and doing a bit of audience research. It genuinely is one of the most useful marketing exercises that you can do. Don't forget to like this video and click the subscribe button and the little bell icon to be notified when we make more. And don't forget also that if you want some help with your digital marketing, then over at exposioninja.com, we have the world famous free website and marketing review. All we need is a bit of info about your business and what goals you have for the next 12 months. And we'll go and put together some marketing ideas. will do an audit of your current website and how you're generating traffic and suggest some ways that you can increase that traffic to hit your goals for the next 12 months. It's amazing, really good service. So, head over to exposioninja.com for that. Until the next video, see you