How to Find Your Target Audience

Your target audience is a huge part of your business and one of the most important marketing fundamentals.

By target audience, we mean your ideal customers – the people you want to buy your product or service.

Not having a clear target audience will result in you firing disjointed marketing campaigns on as many platforms as possible and seeing what sticks. Let’s not do that.

Instead, let’s explain how to find your target audience and what you will want to know about them.

Spoiler alert: This goes beyond their age and where they live.

There are several ways you may develop a target audience:

You’ve got a great product and know there’s an audience for it; you’re just not sure who they are.
You want to create a product in a specific industry but aren’t sure who will buy it and what they will want to buy.
You have a product and a simple target audience, but you want to give your marketing more focus.

No matter where you’re at with creating a target audience, these tips will help guide you towards a more specific target audience, making your marketing efforts (and budget) go further.

Instead of running ads on Google searches for vague terms, you’ll know the exact terms your target audience is searching for.

Instead of putting ads in magazines you know are read by a lot of people, but not your real customers, you’ll be able to place ads in publications you know your audience is actually reading.

How to Find Your Business’ Target Audience

There are five areas you need to consider when trying to find your target audience. These areas will take you from a basic target audience profile to a detailed buyer persona.

The five areas are:

Demographics
“Towards” Motivations
“Away From” Motivations
Online and Offline Habits
Quote Library.

Demographics

We’ll start with the basics — demographics. First, you need to know:

Where your target audience lives
How old your target audience is.

You may also want to consider gender if you sell a gendered product, such as health and wellbeing products or some clothing products.

This gives you somewhere to start from.

If your target audience is local because you’re a local business, you want to focus on local marketing channels rather than spending time and money on national campaigns.

If your target audience is between 18 and 24 and you want to target an international audience, Instagram could be a great platform for you.

Knowing where your audience lives and how old they are may help you decide on marketing channels, but it won’t help you create a tone of voice or what type of content will appeal to your audience.

A 28-year-old with a new baby is looking for different products than a 28-year-old who wants to upgrade their gaming PC. They could both live in the same town and be the same age, but they’re looking for totally different things.

Let’s use weed killer as an example product.

You’ve decided you want to target a national audience between the ages of 25 and 35. Most of your customers are 40+, and you’d like to try and break into a younger market.

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‘Towards’ Motivations

So, we need to look at more questions to help us understand our target audience better, starting with “towards” motivations. These are things consumers want to work towards.

Keeping your product or service in mind, think about the following questions.

What does your target audience want to achieve?
How can your product or service help them achieve this?

Before you say, “I sell weed killer. How does this apply to me?” hear us out.

What do your target customers want to achieve? They want to achieve a great lawn with no weeds.

How can your product or service help them achieve this? It’s a weed killer; it kills the weeds.

Yes, we’re using words like “achieve” and “motivation”, but that doesn’t always mean something grand. Some people really do just want a lawn with no weeds.

You could advance on this, describing more clear intentions.

What do your target customers want to achieve? A great-looking lawn with minimum effort.

How can your product or service help them achieve this? Your weed killer only needs to be applied once a year and only takes 10 minutes.

‘Away From’ Motivations

For every “towards” motivation, there are a few “away from” motivations. These are things consumers are worried about or want to avoid.

The questions you want to ask here are:

What is your target audience scared of?
What does your target audience dislike about your industry/ competitor products or services?
How can you calm your target audience’s fears?

Let’s go back to our weed-killer example. By typing “Why is weed killer” into Google search, we can already see a few concerns consumers have auto-filled by Google.

Consumers are under the impression that weed killer is:

Bad
Expensive
Doesn’t work
Dangerous
Bad for the environment.

Consumers are scared that the product is dangerous. They dislike that it’s bad for the environment.

There are likely some other fears your target audience will have on top of this. Maybe they’re scared that weed killer is complicated and are worried about ruining their lawn.

If your product isn’t dangerous, doesn’t have a negative impact on the environment and is easy to use, then you can lean into this and become the brand that puts these fears at ease.

You could do this by making content about how to use weed killer safely in the form of blog content or videos that your target audience can watch to learn how to apply weed killer without ruining their lawn.

For those worried about environmental impact, you could create educational content about weed killers and the environment, explaining the damage traditional weed killers are reputed to cause, and then explain why yours is environmentally friendly.

We’ve already come up with two content ideas for an imaginary business, with little to no research, just by asking a few questions about our target audience and their motivations.

Online and Offline Habits

Now, we need to find out where this audience spends their time and the type of content that will get their attention. So, what are their online and offline habits? By this, we mean the places they spend time online, in person and the content they read in physical form, such as in magazines or newspapers.

It’s important to remember that just because you love a specific channel, that doesn’t mean your audience feels the same way. You might spend all day scrolling through TikTok and think it’s the best while your audience is reading enough magazines to keep W.H. Smith afloat.

It’s important to step back and look at your audience’s habits.

Back to our lovely weed killer example. Your first thought might be to start placing ads in gardening magazines. It’s a gardening product, so it makes sense, right?

Nope, not for this audience.

Think about their motivation. They want a great-looking lawn with minimum effort. It’s unlikely someone who wants to spend as little time as possible making their lawn look good is reading gardening magazines to learn about the ins and outs of gardening.

So, let’s think a bit outside the box. Maybe not quite as outside as the Harry Styles Ideal Home photoshoot though.

(The joke is that his album is called “Harry’s House”, so he did a shoot with a home magazine to promote it).

Moving on.

We know our audience is aged between 25 and 35, so let’s see where these age groups spend their time.

Facebook and Instagram’s largest age groups are 25-34, and YouTube’s is 15-35. What could you do on these three platforms to connect with our audience?

On Facebook, you could join Facebook groups for new homeowners or first-time gardeners and join the conversation there. Offer helpful insight first and then promote your products second.

Better yet, write blogs for your website and then share the link to that blog in these groups. That said, don’t just drop your link and leave. Create posts that add value to the group and explain that they can learn even more if they read your blog.

On Instagram, you can share relatable Reels (short videos) that will make your audience laugh and teach them about weed killers or other elements of gardening.

This example from Emma’s Allotment Diaries on Instagram shows her sharing her successes and her failures, highlighting how just because she shares great photos of her gardening wins on Instagram doesn’t mean she hasn’t had her fair share of gardening fails.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Emma – Allotment gardening for beginners (@emmasallotmentdiaries)

You might be wondering if this exercise still works if you already have customers. Absolutely. If you already have customers, that means you have another way you can learn about them – by asking them about themselves.

Offer your customers an incentive, like a voucher (could be for your product/service or for another business like Amazon) and interview them about themselves, using the questions above. Of course, you probably won’t ask them, “What are your aspirations?” – it will be more tailored to your business, for example, “What’s your goal with your garden?”.

Use these answers to help identify your target audience and to create a buyer persona.

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Quote Library

Now that we’ve answered all these questions, we’re going to create a quote library.

This is made up of two things:

A few statements that capture your target audience’s needs, wants and fears.
Past statements your sales team has used with customers that really resonated with them.

You might not be able to do the second one just yet, and that’s ok. Just use what you already found out about your audience.

In our weed killer example, we’ve identified an audience who:

Lives in different places around the country
Are aged between 25 and 35
Want a great-looking lawn with minimum effort
Are worried that weed killer is dangerous, hurts the environment and is complicated to use.
Spends time on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook

One of your quotes might look something like this:

“I’m a 31-year-old first-time homeowner. I’m struggling to keep on top of the garden and compared to my neighbours, it looks messy because it’s full of weeds. I just want it to look tidy, but I don’t have time to pull out all the weeds. Weed killer seems like my only option, but I’m worried about the environmental impact and scared that I’ll kill all my grass and the garden will look worse. I’ve been looking for answers in a new homeowners Facebook group I’m in, but I’m too embarrassed to ask for help there. I’ve searched YouTube for advice, but all the videos I found used loads of jargon I just don’t understand.”

Summary

Now we have a really great idea of the type of person we’re marketing to, what they want to achieve, what they’re worried about and where they go to find information.

We did all this by asking these questions:

Where does your target audience live?
How old is your target audience?
What does your target audience want to achieve?
How can your product or service help them achieve this?
What is your target audience scared of?
What does your target audience dislike about your industry/ competitor products or services?
How can you calm your target audience’s fears?
Where is your target audience spending time? (Online and in-person)

If you can answer all these questions or even just a few of them, you can focus your marketing efforts where they’re needed.