How To Find Your Target Audience Using Advanced Tracking

All too often, businesses fall into the trap of marketing to “everybody.” Casting a wide net is likely to drive more sales, right? Wrong.

In reality, you need to know how to find your target audience so that you can develop a marketing strategy that’s perfectly suited to them.

But why?

Marketing is only effective if you target the right social media audience. If you market to the wrong people, your messaging will fall on deaf ears.  And you will waste time and money trying to reach people who will never buy your product or service.

For instance, let’s say you’re a marketing manager at Nike and you want to run a Facebook campaign to promote your new sneakers.

As you want to reach as many people as possible, you decide to target “anybody who wears sneakers.” You then wonder why click-through rates (CTR) are low and your campaign isn’t generating sales.

The reason for this being that your social media audience isn’t just any random person who wears sneakers. Instead, your social media audience would be made up of ambitious, health-conscious millennials who love fitness and would be willing to pay a premium for their footwear.

But how can you come to this conclusion?

To achieve this, you must know how to find your target audience. There are many ways of going about this and advanced brand tracking is one of the most powerful ways among them. It helps you gather reliable brand performance insights straight from the people that matter — consumers.

So, let’s dive right in.

Why Bother Focusing on a Target Audience?

Market research is no walk in the park, so before we start discussing the ins and outs of advanced brand tracking, let’s remind ourselves why having a target market is important. From growing your engagement to sales, there’s a lot that finding your audience can help you with.

Marketing to specific target audiences will enable you to:

1. Prioritize which channels to be present on: Demographics have a huge influence on social media usage. If your ideal customer persona is made up of IT executives, you will probably have to concentrate on LinkedIn. By the same token, if you are focused on Generation Z, it might be worth doubling down on social media platforms like TikTok or Snapchat.
2. Create relevant content: What pain points are your target consumers experiencing and what kind of information are they searching for? Knowing your target people will enable you to select the right topics and SEO keywords, rather than wasting your time producing content that is too generic and doesn’t help bring prospects into your marketing funnel. So make sure you analyze your audience thoroughly.
3. Craft powerful messaging which resonates with your customers: Your taglines, product descriptions, and website copy should speak to your customers. The more specific the customer group, the easier it is to create relevant messages for them. This, in turn, helps drive customer loyalty and advocacy.
4. Use your marketing budget more efficiently: Set your social media campaigns to target people likely to become customers, instead of wasting money on those who aren’t interested or aren’t in a position to buy from you.
5. Shoot for a premium pricing strategy: For example, an organic bakery appealing to environmentally and health-conscious millennials can command higher prices for handmade vegan bread buns than a supermarket selling normal bread to everyone.

Think of your audience as being your north star. Being crystal clear about who your customers are will help guide your business, brand, and content decisions. These, in turn, pave the way for you to build brand recognition and loyalty.

How to Find Your Target Audience — The Basics

Before you can determine the right target audience using advanced brand tracking, you need to grab a pen and paper and determine a starting point for yourself first. This is the first step that you need to take to find your target audience.

So, let’s take a look at how you can do it.

The first step is to conduct a thorough analysis of your current customers. The best place to start is probably your CRM or customer database. You can also check Google Analytics to find your customers’ characteristics.

Image via Pinterest

Then take this a step further and take a look at your social media following. Who is liking, sharing, and engaging with your content? Where are your inbound leads coming from?

Try to pinpoint traits these people have in common based on demographics, behavior, psychographics, and geographics to find your target audience. Let’s take a look at these critical factors in more detail.

Demographic Information

The simplest way of finding and segmenting your target market is based on quantifiable information like age and gender. For example, you might define a group as “women aged 40-55 who live alone and earn over $60,000 per year.” The demographic factors that you should consider include:

• Age
• Gender
• Profession
• Living situation
• Hobbies and interests
• Marital status
• Whether or not they have children

You can find visitor demographics in Google Analytics by going to Audience & Demographics.

Image via PickFu

Behavior Information

Next, divide your customer groups based on their purchasing behavior, which is known as behavioral segmentation. This is important to discover your audience’s motivation and more. For this, you need to answer questions like:

• How frequently do they purchase your product or service?
• What motivates them to buy products or services – from you, or in general?
• Do they prefer to purchase online, via telephone, or in-store?

Psychographic Information

Psychographic segmentation enables you to understand your ideal customers on a more personal level and figure out what makes them tick. These factors include things like:

• Political opinions
• How “green” or environmentally-conscious they are
• Causes they care about, such as animal welfare and BLM (Black Lives Matter)
• Personality traits like introversion and extroversion

You can find audience psychographics in Google Analytics by going to Audience>Interests.

Image via MBA Skool

Geographic Information

The location of your customers is also important to take into account, especially if your company has an international customer base. Some of the factors you should consider for this are:

• Weather
• Cultural norms
• Language
• Social media usage and the popularity of different channels like Instagram
• Brand recognition

Image via Yieldify

Demographics, behavior, psychographics, and geographics will help you identify the traits of your current customer base. You can then align your digital marketing strategy accordingly.

However, your marketing plan is not static, and neither are your customers. After your initial analysis, you may need to tweak your approach over time.

This is exactly what advanced brand tracking helps you achieve through social media analytics.

Here’s how to find your target audience using advanced brand tracking:

How to Find Your Target Audience with Advanced Tracking

Cold, hard data is critical to find your target audience and that’s where advanced tracking can come in very handy for your brand.

And how can you go about this?

To determine the right target market, you need to target them with marketing campaigns and determine how they respond to your brand as a result.

Latana is an advanced brand tracker that uses machine learning technology to provide insights into target audience demographics. This solution can help you answer questions like:

• Which audience is most aware of your brand?
• Which audiences would consider using your brand over others in your industry?
• Which customer segments are at risk of switching to a competitor brand?

Image via Latana

How does Latana achieve this?

Upon setting up your account with Latana, you will be asked to determine the characteristics of your target audience. Latana’s AI technology will then make sure that brand surveys are only sent to people who fit your buyer persona.

The data collected from your audience is then treated by an algorithm that learns over time and reduces the noise to give you data that more closely aligns to real-world changes. This data is then fed into your brand funnel where you can see how your target audience has reacted to recent marketing efforts.

Based on these results, you’ll be able to figure out your target audience better.

What’s more?

If you have a very skinny brand funnel, then your campaigns might be doing nothing to create awareness among your target audience, let alone brand loyalty. Of course, it could be that your campaigns just aren’t hitting the spot – but it could also be that this just isn’t the right audience for your brand.

So, how can you find your target audience using advanced brand tracking?

Let’s find out…

1. Play with Your Data

The cool thing about advanced brand tracking with Latana is you don’t have to stick to your preferred target audience at launch.

Using the characteristics included in the platform (age, gender, location, education, income) plus any extra characteristics you decide to add yourself, you can slice and dice the data to create more audience segmentations.

Doing so can help you discover new audiences that you might have overlooked otherwise. Also, you may be able to find an audience that’s better suited to your brand than the one that you’ve been targeting currently.

For instance, say you initially thought that women aged 18-28 living in the UK and interested in yoga were the ideal target audience for your brand. However, according to your brand funnel, performance with this audience is pretty bad.

So, you start playing around with that data and look at how you perform with a male audience instead. Bam! Your brand performance increases two-fold. This could mean that this is a better audience for your brand instead.

2. Check Competitor Performance

Everything you can track for your own brand with advanced brand tracking, you can also track for your competitors.

One of the key things all businesses strive to do is stand out from the competition. This can be seen in their brand images, creative styles, voices — and also their target audiences.

And guess what?

You can achieve that using advanced tracking from Latana too.

How, you may ask?

Just the way you can use advanced tracking to find your target audience, you can use it to see the audiences that are working best for your competitors.

You can then leverage this audience for your social media marketing campaigns and see if it performs better than your current audience. Such competitor research can better equip you for your social media marketing campaigns.

Of course, this also works the same on the flip side.

Consider multiple target audiences and see how you perform based on the data provided in your brand tracking dashboard. Then, look at the audiences of your competitors. It might be that there is one specific target audience where you are outperforming them.

While it is great to have more than one target audience for your brand, this audience where you perform better could be a key audience to not only differentiate yourself from the competition but also to propel you forward in terms of growth and profit.

FAQs

Q1. How do you identify your target audience?

A. To identify your target audience, you need to:

• Analyze your website visitors, social media followers, etc.
• Send out customer surveys.
• Use social listening to find out who’s talking about your brand.
• Figure out their demographics, geographics, psychographics, and behavior.
• Segment your audience into marketing personas.
• Leverage advanced brand tracking to find out which audiences are responding the best.

Q2. How would you define your target audience?

A. You can go about defining your target audience based on various factors that include:

• Demographics
• Geographics
• Psychographics
• Behavior

Q3. How do you find the intended audience?

A. To find your intended audience, you need to:

• Brainstorm and find out who would find your product or service useful.
• Analyze your current customers and followers.
• Figure out the characteristics of those who respond well to your marketing efforts.
• Define the audience based on their demographics, psychographics, location, and behavior.

Q4. What are the 4 types of audiences?

A. The four types of audiences that you may come across when you set out to find your audience are:

• Friendly: Audience already believes in you.
• Apathetic: Audience doesn’t care much about your brand.
• Uninformed: They don’t know much about your brand.
• Hostile: Their viewpoint might differ from that of your brand.

Q5. Why do you need a target audience?

A. It’s important to know how to find your target audience because these are the people who might buy from your brand. All of your campaigns have to be tailored to their requirements. If you don’t know your target audience, you’ll be shooting into the dark without any particular direction in mind.

Q6. How do you target new customers?

A. One of the best ways to target new customers is through email marketing. You’ll likely have the email information of all your customers and you can leverage this to send out promotional messages to them.

Q7. How to find your target audience on social media?

A. Here are the steps that you need to take to find your target audience on social media:

• Analyze your current followers on social networks.
• Survey your customers.
• Conduct competitor analysis to find their target audience.
• Find out who’s interacting with your content on social media.

Q8. How to find your target audience on LinkedIn?

A. Here’s the process you need to follow to find your target audience on LinkedIn:

• Analyze your followers, if any.
• Track your social posts and determine who’s interacting with them.
• Put up polls and surveys.
• Analyze the audience of your competitors.

Ready to Market to Specific Target Audiences and Grow Your Brand?

Focusing on a specific target audience will empower you to focus your time, money, and energy on people likely to buy from you. This will have a positive impact on every aspect of your marketing strategy – from branding to content to pricing.

Using advanced brand tracking will help you take this to the next level by providing accurate data on both your and your competitors’ brand performance for certain target audiences. This data can help you determine if the audience you’re currently targeting is the right audience to help you grow or if there is another one out there that could be more beneficial to you.

Does your business market to a specific target audience, or are you still casting a wide net? Comment below to share your experience and what you’ve learned.