Whether traditional marketing or online marketing, the customer always comes first. Identifying the right target audience for your brand is one of the most vital points in a marketing strategy. Every marketing strategy is formulated keeping the target audience in mind. For your SEO campaign, you need to clearly identify your target audience to get the best results from your marketing efforts in the most cost-effective way possible. You need to make a marketing plan & strategy as per the audience persona so that the target audience takes the intended action on the web page.

In the digital age, as we have access to more data than ever, you can consider performing an SEO audit to identify the target audience with high chances of getting associated with the products or services you offer. When implementing search engine optimization techniques, your prime concern is to deliver the best user experience so that the relevant audience chooses your business for the keywords or search terms entered. In this blog, we will discuss how focusing on the right target audience increases impression share, boosts click-through rate and ultimately improves conversion rate.

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What is target audience?

A target audience is a group of users characterized by behaviors, their buying activities, specific demographics, etc and share a common trait or interest. A target audience influences most of the decisions of the marketing strategy. This includes the online platforms the business is targeting. For any digital marketer, it is crucial to know which target audience they are targeting. Suppose you have created an amazing website, optimized your webpage for mobile devices, optimized images, etc. and offer great products or services. But you do not identify your target audience. In such a case, you would lose your website traffic, the cost per acquisition going high and much more.

The target audience in marketing is used to identify the audience persona as they represent what the visitors are looking for from the businesses. It also helps businesses clearly determine the relevant users that are interested in the business offerings so that their marketing efforts do not get wasted on irrelevant users. Some of the essential points on which the target audience can be divided are listed below.

The purchase intention highlights the intention of the group of people who are looking for specific products or services. After the results for the search query entered appear, there may be users that click on the organic search results and, after reaching the website, take the intended action. However, not all users follow the same buying journey and may add the products to the cart before taking the intended action. They may perform the complete action on the same day or take some time to make a purchase. This would help you best to identify who are the target audience that you need to focus on.

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  • Interests – Another essential point that you need to focus on to find your target audience is knowing the visitors’ interest. Knowing this data about what the people are interested helps you to find your target audience easily. When you work on audience marketing, this becomes quite essential to show your products or services to the users who have high chances of taking the intended action. E.g., You run e-commerce PPC ads for a sports bike. This clearly means that you need to build an e-commerce store in your audience marketing strategy with a prime focus on youngsters who are interested in sports bikes. There may be users looking for different bikes, but the prime audience for your business is those interested in sports bikes. So, when you run an ad campaign on Google Ads or Bings Ads, you can perform audience segmentation much better. You can then work on writing effective ad copies, ad descriptions, etc. so that the target users click on your ad.
  • Subculture – These are the type of users that have a shared experience. Subculture enables audience marketing to segment their markets to meet the specific needs, interests, etc. A subculture exists as a distinct cultural group that exists as an identifiable community. E.g., Suppose you have a music store. You can focus on building an audience persona so that you are aware of the users that you are targeting.

How to find the target audience for your business

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  • Conduct market research – In your audience marketing strategy, the essential point that you need to focus on is conducting market research so that you can identify your target audience. The market research not only helps to find your audience but also helps to know about your brand awareness. You need to perform a complete market research for the products or services that you offer so that the target users choose your brand over competitors. When conducting market research to identify your target audience, some of the points you can focus on are listed below.
    1. Perform competitor research.
    2. Identify the number of backlinks.
    3. Images are optimized or not.
    4. Keyword ranking.
    5. Traffic on the webpage.
    6. Product page descriptions.
    7. Whether the page has engaging videos.
    8. Audience persona (based on hobbies, lifestyle, location, gender, income level, etc.).

The market research helps in knowing the exact users that you need to target to increase the traffic on the website so that they take the intended action and improve the conversion rate. As market research is a long process, you can outsource market research services to improve your website ranking on the SERPs. The experts examine critical PPC metrics or SEO metrics that matter the most for your business.

  • Identify industry trends – Another essential point that you need to focus on to identify your target audience is focusing on the industry trends. There are constant changes going on in the digital marketing world and you need to clearly focus on identifying the industry trends related to your business. When you offer products or services as per the industry trends, users’ trust in your brand increases. The users feel that they are getting the products or services in demand. Just like you focus on running ad campaigns in sync with the PPC trends to keep the users’ interest engaged, you need to focus on SEO trends so that the target audience takes the intended action on the web page.

As constant marketing trends keep evolving, you need to focus on including SEO trends in your audience marketing strategy so that the target users get associated with your brand. To find your audience, you need to identify the search engine optimization trends so that you can improve the performance of the SEO campaign. When you focus on identifying industry trends, you see your SEO campaigns receive an increased number of clicks, website traffic, etc. The in-market audience can easily identify your brand name and make a click on the search result to reach your website. When you focus on identifying the industry trends, your brand loyalty increases. Some of the points you can focus on to identify the target audience in marketing is listed below.

    1. Use different  SEO tools.
    2. Perform niche marketing to identify the target audience.
    3. Audience segmentation.
    4. Buying activities.
  • Demographic targeting – The next important point to focus on in the audience marketing strategy is to perform demographic targeting. Demographic targeting is essential for your online marketing strategy to identify the target audience. The demographic targeting can be performed with any form of digital marketing, be it PPC, SEO or search engine marketing.

To find your audience, you need to perform demographic targeting so that the target audience chooses your brand. As in the PPC ads, you can perform demographic targeting with Microsoft Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. You focus on ad scheduling to choose the location you are targeting. You consider performing keyword research to identify relevant keywords with high search volume. When running ad campaigns, with a smarter keyword bidding strategy and bid adjustment, you can improve your ad rank & position to increase click on your ad. You can also outsource white label PPC services to perform demographic targeting as the experts can get the desired results within time.

In the same way with SEO campaigns, you can perform demographic targeting to get in touch with the relevant audience. This is a crucial point to focus on as you may have your website performing better in some specific location and have an improved local SEO. Some of the points that you can focus on when performing demographic targeting are listed below.

    1. Age.
    2. Gender.
    3. Location.
    4. Ethnicity.
    5. Occupation.

demographic targeting

  • Perform competitor analysis – The next important point that you need to focus on to find your audience is performing competitor analysis. As there is intense competition in the digital marketing world, you need to know what the competitors are doing and what they are targeting to be ahead of them. The essential part of doing this is to ensure that you identify whether your target audience is the same as that of your competitors. If you recognize that your relevant users are the same as your competitors, you will have to put in more effort to turn the users to the products or services you offer. You need to ensure that you leave no stone unturned to make these users choose your business.

The competitor analysis helps to know many important points about your business’s domain. You can identify the targeted keywords, the images on the website, the website content, navigation on the website, the location they are targeting, etc. You can prepare a report to perform competitor research and then analyze which essential points you need to focus on. You need to ensure that you grab users’ attention ahead of the competitors’ websites so that they reach your webpage. To do so, you must ensure to write engaging product descriptions, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. When the users reach your website, you need to ensure that you provide them with eye-catching images, have internal links if they wish to reach another page, engaging call to action so that they end up taking the intended action. Some of the points that you can focus on when performing competitor analysis to identify the target audience in marketing are listed below.

    1. Check online presence.
    2. Identify their reviews on online platforms.
    3. Get in touch with their users through email marketing, content marketing, etc.
    4. Analyze website traffic.
    5. Identify the number of backlinks that your competitors are getting.

You can analyze the performance of various SEO metrics in Google Analytics and determine whether they are yielding the desired results. With the help of Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, you can see how the ads are performing. You can also see whether your website is optimized for mobile devices or not. With the launch of mobile-first indexing, optimizing your website for mobile devices becomes essential. The website health report includes a keyword report, backlinks report, etc. You need to utilize the SEO data to make SEO strategies to ensure that the right audience reaches your web page. Some of the points that you can focus on when analyzing website performance are mentioned below.

    1. On-site performance of SEO metrics.
    2. The traffic on the website.
    3. Click-through rate on the website.
    4. The title tags and headers are descriptive and eye-catching.

click through rate one of the main metrics in seo report

  • Leverage social media analytics – The next important point to focus on in your strategy to find the target audience is leveraging social media analytics. With nearly 3.7 billion social media users and growing, you cannot miss out on the opportunity to get in touch with such a wide audience. Today social media marketing is becoming an essential part of marketing strategy for businesses of any size. You need to prepare a report on various social media platforms that you are targeting and analyze the data from these to make changes in your strategy to target the relevant audience.

You must have seen that digital marketing during Coronavirus had a completely different role to target the audience. So, you need to ensure that you build brand awareness on social media platforms so that the target users do not have a second thought when choosing your business. E.g., Facebook changing its name to META, responsive ads becoming the default type for expanded text ads, etc., you need to ensure that you provide products or services in sync with the latest marketing trends so that the target audience can trust your business. You may be running holiday ads, optimizing YouTube ads, optimizing Facebook ads and optimizing LinkedIn ads to see an increased return on investment. When you prepare a report to identify the target audience, you need to focus on analyzing the data from various social media platforms. You get to see which social media platform drives more traffic and gives particular focus to them.

As social media is a platform that like-minded people use, you need to focus on choosing the relevant audience you are targeting. This can be understood with the point that Facebook is used by friends & family, LinkedIn by professionals and C-level executives, Instagram predominantly by young aged people, etc. You need to focus on writing engaging social media posts so that the users click on them. As you focus on ad relevance so that the target audience does not leave the landing page without taking the intended action. In the same way, you need to focus on having content on the webpage that matches the product description on the SERPs.

social media to strengthen brand message

  • Understand users buying journey – The next important point to focus on in identifying the target audience in marketing is following the buyers’ journey. The users to your website come from various platforms and you need to be aware of the point where they are coming from. You can consider preparing an attribution report in Google Analytics to determine where the users come from. Not all users have the same buying journey and follow a different path to take the intended action. Some reach the webpage and complete the desired action; some add the product to the cart; some navigate through different web page sections, etc.

Understanding users buying journeys is even more critical for e-commerce businesses. As e-commerce trends are always in demand, you need to focus on audience persona so that the relevant audience chooses your products or services every time that they are looking for your product offerings. When you focus on the target audience in advertising, you need to focus on building an audience persona so that the users take the intended action. The essential points that you need to focus on in understanding the users’ buying journey are listed below.

User journey

  • Conducting surveys – When you work on identifying your target audience in marketing, the critical point to focus on is conducting surveys. The surveys help to know how much the users are interested in the products or services that you offer. You can conduct these surveys through email marketing, content marketing, etc. and identify how much the users are interested in your business. You can prepare an email marketing list, write how-to content, etc. and build an audience persona so that the target audience gets in touch with your business.

With the data that you get from these surveys, you can work on remarketing to make the relevant users choose your business. It would be best if you encouraged the users to give positive ratings & reviews for your business so that you can take the essential steps to improve website performance. If you have a negative review about your products, you should also highlight it on your page to increase the users’ trust. This makes them believe that the company does not hide anything from its users and enhances your brand loyalty.

Why is it important to know your target audience

  • Make better marketing strategies – When you focus on preparing an audience persona in your marketing list, knowing your target audience helps make better marketing strategies. When you work on preparing an SEO marketing list, you can make a list of your target audience based on the audience persona. When you are aware of the buying activities of your target audience, you can make cost-effective and better marketing decisions.
  • Know their interests – Having the knowledge of your target audience, you know about their interests. You can then work on marketing strategy to make plans that best suit the audience’s persona. This helps you design your website, making it easier for the target audience to choose your brand. As in PPC ads, you work on audience segmentation based on their interests so that your ad budget does not get wasted on irrelevant clicks.
  • Time they spend on pages while marketing – When you have a clear idea of the target audience’s interests, you get to see the time they spend on the web page when marketing. You can then work on improving the page loading speed so that the users’ time on the page increases.

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  • Building strong customer relationship – The digital marketing world encompasses a hidden feature, i.e., strong customer relationships. With the intense number of competitors in the digital marketing world, it is essential to build great consumer relationships for businesses. Knowing your target audience is not only about driving more clicks and improving the conversion rate but also delivering great user experiences. This increases the users’ trust in your business and makes them choose your business for the relevant search query.

Closing thoughts

One of the primary aspects of digital marketing is to identify your target audience. If you do not know the target audience, your search engine optimization strategies will get lost in the void. It would be like you traveling on a path and not knowing your destination. Like in PPC ad campaigns, it would be like draining your ad budget on irrelevant clicks, while for SEO, it would be like all your efforts would not deliver the desired results. So, it would be best if you tapped into preparing detailed audience insights to strategize accordingly to improve user experience. This will enhance your marketing efforts and overall business growth. If you find identifying the target audience for your business is a troublesome process, you can get in touch with a digital marketing company. The experts have mastery in SEO analytics, guest posting, go-to-market strategy, reputation management, etc. Have an experience with offshore digital marketing services and skyrocket your business sales.

References

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