In today's video marketing tips, I want to talk about how to find your target audience, something you should absolutely try to do.
Why? Because if you don't know who your target audience is, then it could be hard to know how to speak to them through your video content.
What Is a Target Audience?
You've probably heard the term before. Every marketing campaign – print, digital, streaming, etc. – starts with a target audience. Your target audience is that specific group of people who buy your product or use your services, and therefore, they should see your message.
If you don't know your target audience, then you might want to consider yourself a jack of all trades, but master of none — and should start working out how you're going to rephrase that company slogan. If you start from the basis of knowing who your ideal customer is, it can help clarify your business model. What's more, having a solid grip on your target market will help when it comes to marketing and styling your site for success.
The truth is, in order to be successful in any business venture, you need to know who your audience is—and make decisions based on what appeals to them. The trick is figuring out who it is you're trying to reach.
Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience
There are many benefits of knowing your target audience. Today we'll be talking about how knowing your target audience can help you in SEO, social media marketing and in general business.
Your target audience can be your ideal customer base or a more narrow group than that. It all depends on what type of business you are running and who you are trying to reach. When you understand this information, you will be able to customize marketing campaigns to effectively speak to the people who need what you are selling.
The more specific you are about your audience, the better chance you will have at converting them into customers. Understanding your target audience ensures that you aren't wasting your time and money trying to sell something that isn't a good fit for them.
So when you can customize your message and marketing efforts to a specific audience, then you can:
- Increase your return on investment (ROI).
- Build relationships and simply communicate better with your customers.
- Develop creative and video content that speaks to specific personas
- Personalize your communications to the interests and values of those most likely to purchase the product.
This is essential! In fact, 80 percent of people say they are more likely to do business with a business that offers personalized interactions.
For example…
Say you're selling running shoes and you decide to run an ad during the Super Bowl. Your ad will be seen by millions of viewers, but only a fraction of them will be interested in running shoes. It would probably be more beneficial for your business if you run an ad during a show like The Biggest Loser where the target audience would be more likely to be interested in running shoes.
What Are the Types of Target Audiences?
Your target customer or audience doesn’t always fall neatly into a single category.
Let’s take a look at 4 different ways where you can break up your potential customers:
Interest
As you build a profitable connection with your audience and show that you understand them, it helps to personalize your marketing message by separating your audience into groups based on various hobbies or interests. This helps guide more data-driven, and highly personalized copy, videos and podcast episodes.
Your customers may even say something like, “How do they know that about me? … That’s exactly how I feel.”
This understanding and customization deepens your customer relationships and brand loyalty in a meaningful way.
Purchase Intent
Identify specific groups of customers who are only looking for a specific product or service.
Here at Video Supply, we offer a variety of video production services but some brands may only be interested in creating content for and growing their YouTube channel. That’s when we can talk about YouTube-interested customers so their goals for YouTube are top of mind.
What is that purchase intent and sub-group of customers for your business?
Sub-Group
Along the same lines, consider the sub-groups of people who share common values, experiences, and cultures.
Each culture often comes with its own language and jargon that allows you to further personalize your brand messaging to meet your audience where they are and what they want.
Discover the Roles of Your Target Audience
It's important to understand your target audience before you can start selling to them—and that can be a hard thing to do.
In order to really get a feel for who they are, you need to go beyond just their demographic information and look at what role they play in the path to purchase.
These roles can often be divided into the following categories:
- Influencer: Anybody who influences others' purchase decisions, such as friends or family members.
- Borrower: The person who is borrowing the product, rather than buying it outright. For example, if you're selling a couch, this could be your roommate or cousin.
- End-user: The person who will actually use your product as part of their daily routine (and may even need it for their job).
How do you find your target audience?
To determine your target audience, you need to do some digging.
The following steps will help you find your target audience:
1. Analyze Your Audience and Conduct Interviews
First, you'll want to take a look at the data you receive from consumer engagements. This will help you understand what your current buyers are looking for, as well as what kind of customers are showing interest in your product or service.
Observe how old they are, where they live, their interests, etc. The fastest way to interview your audience and collect this data is to:
- Schedule quick calls with past, current or ideal customers and ask them how they found you, what their goals are, what their struggles are, and anything else to understand your customer’s buying thought process.
- Engage, comment, and post on social media and DMs to establish conversations with your potential customers.
- Distribute custom surveys to collect related information to guide marketing.
Looking at customer reviews and testimonials, as well as any data that's available about who has bought from you before. Go on over to Amazon reviews to see how customers are talking about (for better or worse) similar products to yours.
2. Do Market, Product, and Brand Research
Spend time studying your market, industry, and how customers are interacting with your business and products, and that of your competitors.
By doing this you’ll be able to identify holes in the service or product experience that your company can deliver on so you stand out.
Ask yourself, what’s working and why?
Take note and compile your data into a customer profile document.
3. Competitive Research
Companies like yours can benefit from learning from your competitors to see what they’re doing well and especially what they’re missing out on.
Explore what channels they’re using to reach their target audience? Are they focusing on the decision makers?
4. Create Profiles
After you've figured out who your target audience is, it's time to make them real.
Creating customer profiles or personas is a great way to drill down into the specific segments that make up your target audience. This is especially helpful if you have a product that appeals to a wide swath of consumers. Personas allow you to determine the general demographics, personalities and needs of your target consumers. The persona of “Fran First-Time Runner” will speak to different needs than “Sam Seasoned Pro.”
Personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from to give a more complete view of the buyers. This might include favorite hobbies, television shows, publications, etc. It is recommended that marketers develop between three and five personas.
If you have a large number of personas, consider grouping similar ones together that represent different stages in the buyer journey (e.g., "early adopters" vs."laggards").
5. Identify Who Your Audience Isn’t
Marketing and selling to people who you don’t align with and who will never buy your product or service will set you up to fail, no matter how large your marketing budget may be!
It's important to be clear about who your target audience is—and who it isn’t. If you're looking for women aged 20-40, for example, don't waste your ad dollars on men.
There will certainly be consumers who are close to your target demographic, but who will not act on messaging. Try to be specific in determining who your audience is and who it isn’t. Is your demographic women, or women between the ages of 20 and 40?
Knowing this will keep your teams from devoting ad dollars to segments that will not yield returns.
Focus On Demographics
Find your target audience by creating personas.
Personas are fictional representations of your ideal client. They're made up of the demographics, behaviors and goals of your ideal customer. They help you understand what your customers want, what they need and how to reach them.
Personas are often used as a way to create more effective marketing campaigns and content. Personas can help you identify which channels to use and what messaging will resonate best with your audience.
Consider using the following demographics and identifiers:
- Location
- Gender
- Age
- Interest or Hobbies
- What they read/watch/listen to
- Income
- Education level
- Profession
- Marital status
- Who they trust
- Culture or Community
Put your expert knowledge to use!
Now that you have a deeper understanding of your target audience it’s time to create marketing content like video to engage, educate, and enroll your audience into your business.
When it comes to producing video content for your business, one of the first things you should do is gain inspiration from marketing campaigns that have worked in the past and which sit within your sector and which were aimed at your target audience. Don’t ignore ideas that are proven to have worked, just don’t copy someone else’s ideas outright!
With some planning, research, and educated assumptions you and your business can produce video content which isn’t just a marvel to look at but more importantly something that is engaging and relevant to the right people — your target audience.
Ready to start producing amazing video content for your business? Start with browsing our curated video content types.
