In this episode, we’ll talk about identifying a target audience, so you know exactly who you’re trying to attract when creating your website and other marketing materials. Make sure you grab a copy of my Website Planner so you can document your target audience once you identify it.
Transcript
Chrissy (00:08):
Welcome to Website Success. I’m your host, Chrissy Rey, and I have more than 25 years of experience helping my clients make websites that their clients love. Tune in each week as I share tips and tricks that’ll help you make your website the best it can be.
(00:27):
Welcome back. In this episode, we are gonna talk about identifying your target audience. If you wanna reach the goals for your website or really any other marketing campaigns or ads or social media, then you need to know who your target audience is so you can create those materials to attract them and appeal to them.
(00:47):
So just what is a target audience? In the simplest terms, it’s the group of consumers who are most likely to buy whatever it is you’re selling. So whether it’s a service, a product, or if you’re trying to get donations, then this is the group of people that are going to most likely work with you. Therefore, it’s really important to attract those particular customers, those consumers, when it comes to your website, your social media, your ads, and any other marketing campaigns that you might create. Knowing your target audience is going to help you make decisions about things like the colors that you use, any images like icons, photographs, or anything like that. The language that you use, whether it’s formal, informal, or if you use specific jargon and many other aspects of your marketing strategy.
(01:37):
So just how do you figure out who is in your target audience? You have a few things to think about with that, and you can, you can use all of these bullet points that I’m gonna talk about, or you can use one of ’em and start from there. But I want you to hear me out.
(01:51):
So the first thing is, who do you wanna work with? Think about that. Think about who it is that you wanna work with and who do you truly serve? Did you have a group in mind when you started your business? That’s the first place to start because that’s probably gonna be at least part of your target audience.
(02:09):
Next thing you can do is figure out who you can best serve. So who really needs your offer? Who can you help with your product or services or whatever it is that you are trying to get people to buy?
(02:21):
Another thing you can do is analyze your current customer base. So this is really easy if you already have customers and you wanna think about who is it that you’re already attracting, who is already buying from you. And if you have a website or social media or anything like that, then you can actually look at the analytics that are built into those platforms and you can see who is already interacting with you. In the case of some of the social media, like Instagram and Facebook, you can actually drill down and see demographics about that target audience who is interacting with you. And you can see things like their gender, their age, where they live, and things like that.
(02:58):
So those are all important to figuring out your target audience. Another thing you can do is define who your target audience isn’t. So one of the biggest things I see is business owners that are trying to serve everyone. Don’t do it. Don’t try to serve everyone. It’s just not worth the stress. Trust me on this. I’ve been there, I’ve been in business for a very long time, and I don’t serve everyone. I have some very specific target audiences for each of the businesses that I run, and it’s really worked well by selecting a target audience and defining who I don’t want to work with. So I know it may, it’s ha may be very tempting to accept money from anybody that’s willing to pay you, but I really want you to resist that there are gonna be people that you don’t wanna work with that don’t give you that warm and fuzzy feeling. And so try to define who those people might be and make a note of that because you don’t want them to be your target audience. So if you’re having trouble figuring out who your audience is, start broad and then cross groups off based on who you don’t wanna work with.
(04:02):
Another thing you can do is conduct competitor analysis. Do a little recon. Spy on your competitors, figure out who they are targeting. And you can use a tool like Spark Toro, which you can get to at sparktoro.com and that can help you figure out who is actually working with your competitors. You do need a free account to do this, but the free one gives you up to 50 queries. So SparkToro, what you can do is you can query and see who is visiting specific websites, who is interacting with certain social media and a lot of other things that you can do some research with. The paid accounts will give you more information and more insight into who is interacting with those other websites and social media accounts. So it’ll give you things like demographic info and it’s not very expensive, so it might be worthwhile to upgrade to a paid account for a month while you’re doing this research into who your target audience is.
(04:57):
Now, if you don’t have any competitors, or if you don’t think you have any competitors, you probably do. I mean, you, you might have a really great idea and a really great business that’s completely unique. But I, I want you to go to Google, Bing, whatever search engine you like to use and search for keywords and phrases that describe your business and see if you can find some competitors. And then again, you can go back to SparkToro and you can do some research based on that information.
(05:25):
Now, after you do some research, try to come up with one or two audiences that you wanna serve and think about. And again, this isn’t just for your website. This is gonna be for all of your marketing materials. So your website, your social media, your ads, anything else that is going to reach out to people that you’re trying to attract to work with you. Those are going to be your target audience or audiences. Just like your website’s goals, your target audience should be as specific as possible and you can make it more specific. So if, if your target audience is business owners, you can make it more specific by adding details like gender, age, income, location, interests, jobs, and really just about anything else that describes individuals within that target audience. So again, for example, instead of saying you wanna target business owners, you could say that you want to target female solopreneurs who are working in the health and wellness industry. And you could narrow that down even further if you wanted to. Or you could say that you wanna work with HVAC and plumbing professionals in the mid-Atlantic region, or you could even work with boutique clothing and accessories retailers with brick-and-mortar locations in the DC metro area. So as you can, as you can see, some of these are very specific. They may not be specific enough. So get as specific as you want to be or as, as you feel like you need to be with these target audiences. Really think about and fine tune these target audiences.
(06:57):
So now that you have some ideas about your target audience, who it is, who it isn’t, make some notes about who they will be in your website planner. So if you didn’t already download the website planner, you can go to websitesuccessacademy.com.
(07:11):
You can grab it from there. If you’re not using the website planner, document your target audience somewhere, write it down, put it in a Google doc, put it in your notebook, whatever it is. And in the next episode, we’re gonna get even more specific with a target audience and we’re gonna create what’s called an ideal customer avatar or a buyer profile. And that’s going to describe an individual within that target audience. So we’re, we’re going, we’re going from general to specific to really, really specific, and that’s gonna be our, our ideal customer avatar or ICA. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for following along, and I’ll see you in the next episode.