Creating a target audience is essential for knowing where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. This helps you to understand who your target customer is and what they care about

What is their demographic information (ex: age range, expertise, location, job title, hobbies, etc.)

What are their psychographic information (i.e., behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, etc.)

Collect demographic data on your target audience

Maria Mora of Big Sea, says, “Before you can identify your target web audience, you need to understand your target customer. We begin with a deep dive with the sales and marketing teams to understand what their client base has looked like in the past, and what their aspirational client base looks like.

Then you can take tactical measures to attract and connect with that audience online.”

“Look at the characteristics of your best existing customers and organize that list into at least one profile based on shared characteristics,” said David Hoos of The Good.

Some good metrics include those with the largest deal sizes, the longest retention, and the easiest customers to work with.”

“Brands should get an accurate report on their current customers,” says Chachi Flores of Peacock Alley. “By running an RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary) analysis on your current clientele, this can help pinpoint your future target audience. RFM can help categorize your target audience into specific levels of buying potential.”

“I would break down your customers into multiple segments if possible,” said Reed. “Find the customers that are the top gross revenue for the least amount of work. Also, find the customers that may not be the most profitable, but that are repeat customers that keep the daily operations funded.

And find out which customer segments you may actually lose money on, and justify if there is a need to market to that customer segment. Knowing who you currently work with gives you the opportunity to really build upon and reach more of that target audience.

And find out which customer segments you may actually lose money on, and justify if there is a need to market to that customer segment. Knowing who you currently work with gives you the opportunity to really build upon and reach more of that target audience.

The best way to work out which consumers to target is to identify who has a need or interest in your product or website and then begin narrowing it down from there. Start by pinpointing all of the different features and qualities of your offering, then have a think about who would benefit from these features.

If it’s a blog or website, this might be having specialist knowledge in a niche area, having a trusted and unbiased perspective, or a special widget that makes your site easy to use and find information from.

When you begin to understand the benefits of your site, you can begin to understand who would value these features. For example, older travelers who are slightly technophobic would benefit from a website with a helpful widget that allows them to compare deals easily. Similarly, avid travelers would value an unbiased blog, which gives them honest holiday tips. From here, you can begin to target the people you know will get the most benefit out of using this site.

Think of yourself as the solution to someone’s problem,” says Cole.“Whose problem are you the solution for? Who has the problem, and what is your solution?

To identify your target audience for your site, you have to go backward, starting with your final goal,” says Minuca Elena. “Who could buy what you are selling? Even if you sell services or you sell products (your own products or as an affiliate), there is still a sale involved.

Ask yourself who are your ideal clients, what profession or hobbies do they have, gender, age, income, topics of interests, etc. For example, let’s say you are selling baby gear, then your target audience is young moms, with an age between 25-40 years old, that are searching for parenting advice.

To better understand the customer, I would suggest marketers up draw up their demographic portrait. This process is a bit like creating a character in the video game Sims: at the beginning, you have a digital person with a zero background, but gradually he has a house, work, hobbies, and friends. It is important to make the portrait as detailed as possible so that the abstract client turns into an old acquaintance. Also, if you have direct competitors, it will be logical to look for the target audience among their subscribers on social networks. You can add potential customers as friends and invite them to your group, write private messages, or set up targeted advertising on them.

Collect data on user behavior, location, and demographics,” says Cierra Flythe of BoardActive. “Expanding your user profile gives a website insight into the type of user that does/does not engage and interact. Once you back your website marketing with user data, it is much easier to segment campaigns effectively.

For B2B, go beyond demographics & firmographic data. While this is helpful, you’ll need to get beyond information like job titles, industries, and company size. If you want your website to perform for you, you’ll need to understand the indicators that let you separate your audience from someone that looks like they’re your audience.

One of the best methods is running surveys to find out who the leads who convert to customers actually are. After all, your target audience should be the people who find your services of value – even if you’re currently targeting a different group with your website messaging.

Rubkiewicz recently ran a survey looking to understand what blog readers wanted to get from their articles and newsletters.

We ran a survey on some of our most popular articles on the blog and were astonished to collect over 600 answers – just within 3 days,” said Rubkiewicz. “You can imagine how many insights that gave us as to which content we should write to make a difference for our target audience and turn them into prospects.

Talk to your current customers. Build a survey with one of the many free survey tools (Google Forms is an obvious starting place) aimed at identifying key personas and combine with Audience data from your analytics.

You want first to identify what is the purpose of your product or service. Really take some time on researching and finding the benefits that your product or service provides. Then you will identify who exactly is buying or in need of your particular services. Then you can go to popular online forums like Reddit or Quora to see who exactly is asking questions or interested in that industry/niche. This will help you pinpoint what age group, gender, and industry that your target audience might be in. Once you have narrowed down who this audience might be, you will be in a better position to market specifically for this group of people

If you have yet to identify the segment you most resonate with, focus on distribution and user studies,” says Yaniv Masjedi of Nextiva.”Promote your content among new audiences, then engage with and read user feedback. From there, you’ll begin to notice trends in which demographics most align with your content. And, you’ll have insights into how to best tailor it to them.

Know your niche and own it. Spend the majority of your time focusing on all things related to your website. Your target audience should be hyper-focused because that is who will most likely be interested in your products or services. Have a specific plan of action with your targeted audience, and stick to that plan

Define a group of people you want to reach with your marketing message. Really narrow down and define who you are trying to appeal to. It is impossible to target everyone, so the more specific you get, the better. Your website will gain much more attention if it solely appeals to your designated target audience.

Join trade associations, attend events, join groups and forums where your target audience hang out. Listen to podcasts, Q&As, etc. Lurk and listen to their stories, problems, etc. Interact if you have something of value to offer for free. DON’T sell or promote anything when you’re in this research phase. Once you’ve gathered enough data about your target audience’s pain points, you can then build your website to answer those questions and provide solutions to their problems.

My number 1 tip is always to keep a close eye on your competition. If there are companies that are selling a similar product to yourself and have been doing so for years, then they already know your audience very well.

Look at their social media platforms, the type of people that regularly like their posts, and what is the type of content that gets a lot of response?

Compiling this along with the data you already have on current customers can help broaden your audience reach to a group of characteristics that you may not have even considered before

A good way to identify a target market for your website is to use a market analysis method known as market mapping. This is a simple diagram that allows you to identify gaps in the market or industry your product/service/website operates in.

Draw a y and x-axis on a page with the two overlappings in the middle to give you four different sections.

Plot all of your competitors on this chart based on their customer base.

Once you’ve finished plotting all your relevant competitors, look for where there are large empty spaces on the chart

This is where there is a gap in the market. Where there are lots of brands, clustered together shows that a market is oversaturated. By assessing this, you may find that there are plenty of websites catering to formal, experienced professionals, but few that serve casual professionals. Or, perhaps you’ll find that there are websites catering to professionals of all experience levels, but few who serve those with a casual interest. This makes it easy for you to find a niche

What type of person would be most motivated to respond to your call to action? ”says Stevens. “Even thinking on a granular level, such as thinking of just one person, can be extremely helpful. If your friend Todd is the first person you think of when you think about who would answer your call to action, then your next step would be to figure out what type of audience Todd belongs to.

we found that marketers were relying on many target audience tools to collect user feedback and assist with audience research. The most popular tools were: Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Hotjar

Whatever product or service you and your business provide - whether you’re a recruitment agency, shop owner, travel company, or something else entirely - you will have an ideal target audience of consumers

These demographics could include anything from age, gender, where they live, what they do for a job, interests, relationships and so on - and it’s really important for the success and future of your business to ensure you know your target audience inside out.