Do you know where your audience spends their time online or what platforms they use?
Like most marketers, you’re probably always looking for innovative ways to connect with your target audience and increase brand awareness. But have you studied your ideal customers’ online patterns? Do you know how to find your audience on social media?
To figure out how to find your target audience, you first must learn which platforms your audience frequents, what content they consume, and how they interact with your brand. This requires some brainstorming, a little detective work, and an in-depth analysis of your website’s analytics.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about how to find your target audience online so you can tailor your marketing campaigns to them.
How to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media and Elsewhere
As an advertiser, you must comprehensively understand your audience’s digital behavior to nurture and convert them into loyal brand customers.
Here are five methods for finding your target audience online.
1. Identify Your Target Persona
Before you can try to figure out where your target audience is, you have to first figure out who your target audience is.
In the complex world of marketing, defining your customer persona is essential, yet many marketers fail at this. An annual report found that only 42% of marketers know the demographics of their target audience. Without defining your consumer base, your advertising campaigns will certainly fail.
To identify your audience, ask yourself questions about your ideal customer base.
Get specific by asking:
- What is the age range?
- Where do they live?
- Do they have kids?
- What is their educational background?
- What are their interests, needs, and goals?
- What’s their gender?
2. Discover Which Social Media Platform Your Audience Frequents
Defining your customer persona is the first step in finding your target audience. The next is figuring out which social media platforms they frequent. Learning how to find your audience on social media can be tricky if you use a mass-marketing technique that aims to be active on all social channels. Chances are, your audience doesn’t frequent everywhere.
Your audience will latch on to one or more platforms as their main online hangout spots. You can use social media insights to assess which platforms and content resonate most with your target audience. This will help you determine the best content to produce and where to put it.
For example, if you’re in the home and garden industry, you may want to use videos as your content type because gardening naturally lends itself to “how-to” videos that would work great for a platform like YouTube.
Of course, you’ll only want to focus your efforts on social media platforms your target audience uses; there’d be no point in creating stunning graphics if most of your target demographic is exclusively on TikTok.
Determining the social media channels you should target will help you narrow down the type of content you’ll want to produce. It’s a stepping stone in your journey toward increasing customer loyalty.
But oftentimes—somewhere in the Venn diagram of where your audience hangs out and the types of content your brand fits naturally—lies a platform that checks all the boxes.
3. Examine Your Competitors
Chances are good that at least a few of your competitors are succeeding when it comes to customer conversion rates and brand recognition. Why? Because they understand where their target customers are online and how they operate in a digital atmosphere. The key here is to examine their strategies in depth and then replicate their successes.
What platforms are they advertising on? Who are they addressing? What messaging tactics do they use? Identify any opportunities to improve your reach so you can get a solid idea of where your audience operates.
4. Submit Customer Surveys
Your existing customers can provide your business with valuable insights into your target market, especially information about the channels they use.
By surveying current customers, you’ll have a better understanding of their channel preferences and the kind of content they consume. Do they prefer longer video product tutorials? Or do they prefer to consume content in short snippets? Do they have any favorite websites they visit?
Tailor your questions to identify valuable information on consumer trends and practices.
5. Analyze Website Traffic
Dive into the traffic analytics for your website. Specifically, determine who is visiting your site, what the typical bounce rate is, and your current conversion rates. You should also determine where your users come from (referral sources, social media links, industry sites, etc.).
Knowing where your website traffic is coming from provides a good indication of where your target audience spends their time.
Discover Your Audience with Channel Factory
Once you’ve learned how to find your target audience, the next step is to modify your marketing strategies so your ads run alongside relevant content. Channel Factory can get you started. With our contextual targeting services, we can maximize your brand’s recognition by ensuring the right content is paired with your advertisements.
Leverage the power of audience targeting by contacting us for more information.