Are you worried about your engagement rates? Or are the number of people that view your content not where you want it to be? If you want to know how to find your target audience and bump up those numbers, you need to understand your audience.
With so much content being pumped out every single day, getting clarity on how to find your target audience is more important than ever. The attention span of the average online user has decreased tremendously over the last couple of years. This means that people are much more likely to scroll past your content if it does not match their needs or interest. Unless your content directly relates to what these people are searching for, they are not going to be interested, and your engagement numbers are going to stay the way they are.
The biggest problem when it comes to knowing how to find your target audience, is the fact that the marketplace is always changing. The needs of your target audience today may not be the same needs a year later, which is why you always need to keep yourself updated. Knowing how to find your target audience is one thing – keeping them is another.
If you’re struggling to get clarity on your target audience, you’re in luck. Today we’re going in depth on how to find your target audience personas in just 3 steps.
Step #1: Analyze Your Website And Social Media Traffic
The first step to discovering your target audience personas, is to analyze your traffic. If you’ve been producing content for awhile, chances are you’ve already built up a sizable following. You have traffic that’s flowing through your website on a daily basis, or a number of visitors commenting and watching your videos. If you have these things going for you, that’s good news. You’ll be able to analyze this information and use it to your benefit.
When it comes to analyzing your website and social media traffic, you want to determine what exactly is drawing your audience to your website or social media account. This could be factors such as the content you are putting out, what time or day you upload, or how engaged you are with your audience. As you analyze this data in more depth, it’ll reveal a bigger picture as to what kind of content your target audience likes.
For example, let’s say you’ve uploaded a video every single day for the last 3 weeks to your Instagram account, and during that time your engagement has been doing well. When analyzing your social media traffic, you’ll want to look at what specific factor caused these people to watch or comment on your video. This specific factor could be the time at which you uploaded the video. Or the video was different in terms of content from all the other videos. You can also look at how engaged your audience was, such as the number of likes or comments that they left. All of this is information that will help you determine your target audience.
Don’t Look At What’s Consistent, Look At What Stands Out
One of the biggest mistakes most people make when analyzing their traffic is looking at what’s consistent. For example, let’s say you’ve posted 7 videos over 7 days. 6 of those videos got around 20,000 views, with one video only getting 5,000 views. Looking at this data, you might be inclined to focus only on the videos that got 20,000 views. But in reality, the best way to discover your target audience is to look at what stands out.
The reason you want to focus on inconsistencies within your data, is because it’ll help you understand what works and what doesn’t. If your data shows you that every single video you’ve posted has gotten 20,000 views, you can’t learn anything. You don’t know what you’re doing right, or what you’re doing wrong. Your data reflects the needs and behavior of your target audience. The better you can understand what factors contribute to that data, the better you can understand your audience’s needs.
If there are specific days that stand out, focus on those days. Analyze what factors could have contributed to that particular outcome – whether it’s good or bad. If the outcome is a positive one, you can keep that in mind and experiment with putting more of that type of content in the future. If the outcome is negative, look at what differences are responsible for that negative outcome. That particular day could have been a holiday, resulting in less people browsing the internet and explains why your view count went down.
If you want to know how to find your target audience, focus on the things that stand out. They’ll give you more insight into your audience’s needs than focusing on what’s consistent.
Consistency got you where you are today. Will it help you get to where you want to be? Click To TweetStep #2: Audit Your Business Strategy And Compare It To The Marketplace
The second step to discover your target audience personas, is to audit your business strategy. Every time you put out a piece of content, or upload a new blog you should be doing it with a specific reason in mind. There should be a specific outcome that is achieved, which is what your business strategy focuses on. And with the marketplace’s needs constantly evolving and changing, you need to ensure your business strategy reflects those changes.
This is the difference between knowing how to find your target audience and knowing how to keep them. You may be able to attract new visitors to your website or new followers on your Instagram, but unless you understand how their needs change over time you will not have them for long.
For example, at the time of this article being written – Tik Tok is the newest social media platform that has gained popularity. Since its launch in 2016, in just 3 years it has managed to accumulate over 800 million active users worldwide. Compare this to Instagram’s 1 billion monthly users, and it’s very evident how fast the needs of the marketplace can change.
Analyze What Your Audience Does And How They Behave
One of the reasons why Tik Tok gained so much popularity in such a short time, is because a large majority of its user base are young teenagers from Generation Z. This is why it’s important to understand your target audience persona and who you are catering to.
Understanding the marketplace means also understanding what kind of people are interested in your content. You need to factor in things such as their location, age, gender, ethnicity, and interests. All of these play a part in determining what your target audience’s needs consist of, and are factors you will want to account for when analyzing data. One way to discover these factors is to look at what they’re searching for.
If you’re using ads to direct traffic to your website, you can view a lot of information about your target audience through Google Analytics. Some examples of information you can use from Google Analytics are
- Keywords that visitors search for to visit your website
- Length of time visitors spend on your website
- Method in which they got to your website (Organic search, links from other sources)
If you produce a lot of content around finance and one of the keywords your visitors searched for was “financial freedom”, right away you can tell this person is probably an adult or older. You can then proceed to look at what actions this person took while on your website, what blogs they may have looked at and what other keywords they searched for. When you put all of this data together, it’ll give you a better idea of what your target audience personas look like. And in many cases, you will have multiple target audience personas.
Creating A Target Audience Persona
Once you’ve gathered sufficient data, it’s time to get clear on your target audience persona.
When creating a target audience persona, you want to get very specific about who they are and what their needs are. Some traits to include when building your target audience persona are:
- Age
- Gender
- Relationship Status
- Occupation
- Who they follow
- What they might search for
- How familiar they are with your brand
- How they spend their free time
The more specific you can get with these traits, the better your target audience persona will be. If you feel the need to include additional information, such as a target audience persona that “may or may not be in a relationship”, chances are you can create another persona and include that information in. The reason being that the needs and desires of someone who’s in a relationship, will be much more different than someone who’s still single and ready to mingle.
Someone in a relationship might be thinking of getting married and starting a family. They may be concerned with the state of their finances and how they can support a family. This person will be more future-oriented in their thinking, and your target audience persona should reflect those factors.
On the other hand, someone who’s single has different priorities in mind. They aren’t concerned with starting a family – they may be looking to date around and to meet new people. This also implies that this target audience persona consists of a younger generation, who want to spend their youth experiencing all that life has to offer. This person lives more in the moment and is present-oriented with their thinking.
Confused People Do Not Buy
This is why you need to be very specific when it comes to building a target audience persona. Unless you are able to narrow down their traits as much as possible, you are going to create overlaps in the kind of message you’re putting out. That will cause confusion because your audience has no idea who you are trying to target. And confused people, do not buy.
Avoid confusing your audience and yourself by being strict with how you create a target audience persona. If there are any traits that one audience may have that another audience wouldn’t, create a different audience persona to account for that difference. In our own company, we have multiple target audience personas that are based on a variety of factors such as their age, how much income they make and how familiar they are with The Dan Lok Brand.
Once you’ve created and understand your target audience personas, you can begin segmenting them and plan out what kind of content to produce. If you’ve created your target audience persona correctly, you will already know the needs and desires of your target audience. Now, all you need to do is create content that caters specifically to that target audience. The more specific your content is, the more your target audience will feel like you are speaking directly to them.
What’s important to note is that like the marketplace, your target audience persona will change overtime as well. That is why it’s important to frequently compare how your target audience persona matches up with what audience is in the marketplace. As long as you have a clear and solid target audience persona, you’ll be able to effortlessly audit your business strategy to match that audience’s needs.
Step #3: Segmenting Your Audience For Your Email List
Step 3 on how to find your target audience persona, is to segment your email list. We have already covered how to find your target audience persona by analyzing data (In Step 2), thus this section will go into how you can segment your audience for your email list.
Segmenting your audience for your email list is very important. As you have multiple target audience personas, you will also have multiple email lists with different audiences. The last thing you want to do is accidentally send one email list an email that has nothing to do with them. For example, one of the quickest ways you can make your male audience unsubscribe from your email list, is to send them an email letting them know there’s a 50% discount on women’s underwear.
You want to segment your email list to keep your audience engaged. In fact, a study showed that a company managed to increase their open rates by 40%, simply by segmenting their audience. Other benefits also include increased click through rates, increased conversions, more satisfaction amongst their subscribers and decreased unsubscribe rates. Segmenting your audience won’t just help you keep things organized, it’ll help keep your audience happy and engaged as well.
When In Doubt, Ask Your Audience
If you’re wondering what kind of emails to send to your audience, you might believe your target audience persona will tell you everything you need to know. And in theory, that is true and makes a lot of sense. But in reality, the best way to know what your audience wants to receive is to simply ask them.
When your audience wants to opt into an email list, give them a way to choose for themselves. That could mean setting up a checklist of email lists they want to subscribe to, or simply sending them an email from time to time asking them what their preferences are. By letting your audience choose what they want to see, you won’t encounter the mistake of sending them something they don’t want to see.
Remember that you will never know your target audience better than they know themselves. Asking them what they want is a very effective way to keep your target audience personas updated to the needs of the marketplace. It also allows them to feel more engaged, because you’re taking their opinions and feedback into account. This is why the most successful brands and companies often send you surveys asking you to rate their services. They know it is important to hear the voice of their customers, and make sure their needs are met.
Instead of doing research and guesswork, simply go to the source and get the information you need from there. In many situations, you’ll discover that your audience will offer you a lot of insight as to what they’re looking for. They might even share with you their deepest darkest secrets and needs – things you never thought they would be interested in.
“The customer is always right.” – Common proverb
How To Find Your Target Audience Personas In 3 Steps
Knowing how to find your target audience persona can be simplified to just 3 steps:
1) Analyze traffic data
This is where you analyze the traffic data from your website and social media accounts. Look at factors such as keywords your audience is searching for, how much time they spend viewing content, and where they came from before landing on your page.
You’ll want to analyze any sort of data that stands out from everything else, as that will give you the most insight into how you should pivot your approach. Consistent data will show you what you’re doing correctly, but won’t tell you what you need to do to improve or get better. If you want to keep your audience following you for a long time, you need to make sure you’re taking steps to improve every single day.
2) Create target audience personas
From analyzing your traffic data, you’ll be able to gather a lot of useful information about your target audience and their needs. Using this data, you can create your target audience personas.
When it comes to creating and knowing how to find your target audience, you want to be very specific when it comes to what their behavior and traits are like. If there is any information that would overlap with another potential audience, you’ll want to create another audience persona to avoid confusion. If you’re putting out content and your marketing message isn’t clear, you will confuse your audience. This leads to higher unsubscribe rates, unfollows, and lower conversions.
Confused people don’t buy. Click To Tweet
3) Segment them based on their needs
Segment your audience so that you’re delivering to your audience exactly what they’re looking for. To do this, ask them what kind of content they’re interested in or what their individual preferences are. One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to guess what their audience wants. In reality, it’s much more efficient to simply just ask them. You’ll develop a stronger customer-brand relationship, and be able to keep your target audience persona’s up to date with the needs of the marketplace.
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Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of the post. Those are our tips on how to find your target audience personas in 3 steps. Now, what are the chances of you implementing this in your business?
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