How to Identify Your Target Audience

You can narrow down your target audience in just three stages: check who’s already responding, analyse the competition, and write an avatar.

Once you complete these stages, you should have a solid target market to work from – but don’t leave it to the last minute. Identifying your target audience is the single most important thing you can do for your business, and your product. Without an audience, you have no customers, no sales, and no platform to build on.

Why is it important to find a target audience?

Knowing your market can help small businesses effectively compete with large companies, by speaking to a very small segment of your shared customers about a problem the larger company might not effectively solve.

Being informed about your customers helps cut down the time and money you spend on marketing and testing, because once you’ve really nailed down your customer you aren’t buying as many impressions and you know what channels are likely to be effective. By delivering your advertising message in a way and in a place where they respond best, you make the most of that advertising platform’s potential.

And when you define your target audience, you unlock other, more exclusive advertising mediums – that won’t cost you a penny. Word of mouth? Personal, highly effective reviews? Recommendations? They’ll come flooding in once you really connect to those who love your product or service most. They’ll promote your work, simply because they love it.

And you can only get results like that when you know exactly who your audience is.

Is it a good idea to market to as many people as possible?

No. “Everyone will love my product,” you may say. “I’ll target everyone in the world, and some of them might buy!” This is a bad idea, for a few reasons:

1. No one could possibly afford to advertise to everyone in the world. Even McDonald’s and Coca Cola don’t target the global population, although word of mouth may mean they’re known on a global scale.
2. How would you even write an advert that appeals to everyone on earth, ever? That speaks to a truly universal problem, in a language spoken by everyone, promoting a product or service everybody wants and can afford? It’s impossible.
3. Finally, you risk alienating your biggest fans by trying to appeal to too many instead of talking directly to the few.

Even going too general with your audience has the same effect. Some say they target entrepreneurs retirees, or stay-at-home moms. All of these audiences are way too broad.

Targeting a specific market doesn’t mean excluding people who don’t fit some fancy, hoity-toity criteria. You aren’t a country club. Rather, targeted marketing allows you to focus your dollars and your effort on a specific group of people who are more likely to buy from you than others – and if some of those others buy too, that’s great!

Narrowing down your audience

As an example, you don’t have to be a knitter to buy a ball of yarn. Maybe you want to try knitting one day, or maybe you make macrame. Perhaps you have a playful kitten and want to give it something else to destroy instead of your socks. Or you need a gift for a knitting friend, or maybe you just really love the colour and how it feels and smells. Nine out of ten times, however, the advertising for that ball of yarn will be targeted towards knitters and other crafters.

But look closer: even yarn brands advertise to wildly different markets.

Some want to appeal to older knitters, who prefer to knit baby clothes for their grandchildren in quick wash, affordable yarns in bright colours. Others are traditionalists, who love creating luxurious garments in fine fibres and hand-dyed natural colours according to a centuries-old pattern. Yet more are modern, who want to recreate up to the minute clothes. Knitters are predominantly female – which also affects the advertising.

Step 1. Check who’s already responding

How did yarn companies find out who to advertise to in the first place? Well, knitters have existed well before Lion Brand and Rowan – and all these guys had to do was look who was already buying yarn.

Hint: it wasn’t construction workers. It was women, usually older, who were creating clothes for their families and loved ones. From there, all they had to do was niche down depending on who they wanted to target for a new product. Beginner knitter? Here’s some superwash acrylic fibre that’s super easy to use and you won’t wreck on a hot wash! Fisherman’s gansey enthusiast? Here are some traditional Shetland patterns and hand-spun fleece…

You get the picture.

Do you already have customers buying your product? Have they got anything in common? How old are they, what work do they do, how well off are they on average? If you have a fairly disparate audience, can you tell who’s loving your product more, or coming back for seconds?

If you don’t have an audience – or even a product, yet – then skip to step 2.

Step 2. Analyse the competition

Just like no man’s an island, no product is the first in the world. Your offering will not be 100% original, and that’s fine – almost preferable. Aiming to improve on an existing solution means there’s an in-built audience for your offer: you just have to look at your competition to find it.

Who do they market to – and importantly, who do they not market to? Is there a gap in the market (knitting yarns for single men, hello)? Can you fill that gap, or have more success advertising to your competitor’s core audience?

As well as analysing your competition, analyse what their buyers are saying, also. Knowing what they don’t do particularly well is essential for positioning your product as a better option.

Start by searching the keywords and phrases your audience would use to find your product, and note who pops up as well as or instead of you. What’s their marketing like? Who are they talking to?

Step 3. Write an avatar

A customer avatar is an imaginary customer you use to target your marketing. It’s the idea of a person, which you’ll use to guide your advertising efforts. Your customer avatar, for example, may be a nineteen year-old digital marketing novice living in a one-bedroom flat in Soho. How they’re fleshed out – their fears, desires, hopes and dreams – is up to you.

What’s important is to include as much detail as possible.

An avatar is a complete profile of a person, always based on reality. Its purpose is to give you as many ways as possible for reaching your target audience. For example, are they more active on Facebook, or TikTok? Do they like chocolate desserts, or fruity?

Over time, and as you make sales, your customer avatar will evolve as you find out more about who’s really buying your product.

To start, write down your customer avatar’s:
– Name
– Age
– Geographic location
– Socio-economic status

And then start filling in the nitty gritty details which ultimately power their purchasing choices.

An example customer avatar

Creating an avatar is a lot like creating a fictional character. And just like in a good movie, your hero shouldn’t be perfect, and their motivations and goals, fears and desires are more important than their hair colour or age.

Here’s an example of a customer avatar for the survival niche:

Paul is a young man, who doesn’t love the traditional career he fell into. But he loves getting back to nature. A hippie at heart, Paul spends his lunchtimes browsing foraging forums and wood whittling ideas on Pinterest. He’s into soft survival: the fundamentals of shelter and heat, living off-grid, and being as independent as possible while learning skills to gather resources to trade.

He isn’t into all this apocalypse and guns stuff. He dreams of going to live in the woods, building his own house, and farming the land. The best he can do right now is a box of herbs in his kitchen, but that doesn’t stop him researching how to weave baskets with willow and what mushrooms are safe to eat. He’s limited by his urban environment and his budget, but one day Paul truly wants to settle down somewhere rural and start a smallholding.

Paul wants to:

– Experience survivalism without the doom and gloom
– Feel old-fashioned manly: cutting lumber, building fire, butchering meat
– Be able to provide for a future family
– Become self-reliant financially, as well as in terms of food
– Focus on maintaining and repairing good equipment, rather than buying new
– Live well in an arduous situation, as opposed to merely surviving the elements

With so much danger associated with survivalism, Paul worries that he’s way too naive. He has nightmares of going on a grand adventure, only to crawl back to his parents just a few weeks later, unable to survive. He needs to be reassured that it’s possible to have a happy medium, and that prepping needn’t be so stressful.

Paul’s worried about:

– Being unprepared for the reality of a worst case event
– Giving up and falling back into the rat race
– Still chasing his idyllic existence well into retirement
– His parents saying “I told you so”
– Poisoning himself or getting an injury because of lack of core skills

By sketching out a detailed customer avatar, you can tailor the language, tone and visuals of your marketing to exactly that person. This is important because finding your ideal customer is like hitting a perfect note. If you get your avatar right, find your perfect customer and make them feel like you tailored your solution just for them, they’re more likely to become repeat customers and recommend you to all of their friends.

But a symphony isn’t just made up of one note, no matter how perfect. Knowing your target audience in a broader sense will allow you to market to your avatar’s friends, partners, work colleagues and anyone else who shares similar interests, without sacrificing your overall marketing voice.

Have you identified your target audience? Do you go broad, or prefer to focus in on as much detail as possible? Let us know in the comments!