What are customers really looking for when they shop online? The answer might surprise you.

When it comes to shopping, people don’t care about your product or service as much as they care about themselves and what the purchase will do for them. That’s why defining your target audience is such a powerful tool in building a successful business. When you find your target audience you will have an accurate representation of the group of people who you’re trying to sell to so that you can speak directly to their needs and desires – which makes all the difference between getting noticed or lost in the crowd.

It’s as simple as this: the secret to business success is knowing your target market

When I talk about how to find, research and make use of a target audience, business owners sometimes think that this is just another word for “market research” or “target market”. In reality, it’s much more than that.

When audience insights, demographic data (age, gender), challenges, data from Google Analytics etc, are defined and poured into your customer avatar or target audience profile, your business becomes one of the few who actually know their typical customer.

With such precious knowledge under your belt, how you do your marketing – and copywriting – suddenly becomes easier and clearer. Knowing your target audience (aka ideal customer, customer avatar, buyer persona) helps you create better sales content because you’re not writing for yourself anymore—you’re speaking directly to your ideal group of people, addressing their needs and challenges as top priority.

With such clarity, copywriting – particularly sales copy – will become easier to produce and more powerful. It will stop feeling like you are trying to guess what your target audience needs to hear in order to decide that your product or service are the perfect choice for them. It’s also going to help with refining your target audiences for ads.

When used right, this audience focused approach across your marketing strategy will improve conversion rates.

I know it can be difficult to find the time and energy to scale up your marketing efforts as a business owner. However, using audience insights to improve your overall marketing strategy is going to give you clarity and reduce the time (while boosting the quality) of any copy your business puts online, from content for your blog, to social networks, email and anything sales related.

In this target audience 101, I made a list of some of the most common questions business owners have about defining their target audiences and how to use this data to create consumer profiles, upgrade their website experience, write sales copy that converts, refine their targeting and ads.

It’s my hope that this guide will give you some clarity about why target audiences are key to your business success.

So what is a target audience?

In a nutshell, a target audience is a particular group of individuals, a company expects to become clients (aka purchase their product or services).

How is a target audience different from a target market?

The target market is defined as the whole group of people that a brand wants to sell to. Within this group of people there can be multiple target audiences (groups or segments).

What is audience research?

Audience research is a key process in marketing. It’s the process that helps marketers and business owners define target audiences. It collects data on a specific segment or group(s) of people.

Audience research is a way of getting inside the head of your potential customers and understanding what they want from you, how they are interested in your product or service, and what are the pain points your business aims to solve for them.

How is audience research different from market research?

The key difference between these two processes is that audience research is conducted on a specific group of people (or segments) to obtain data about them. Market research is a process marketers conduct to gather information about the market within which the product or service aimed at the audience operates in.

Why do I need to find and know my target audiences?

You can’t be all things to all people. When you find your target audience you suddenly tap into a clarity that will drive forwards all your marketing efforts with unprecedented progress. You will know exactly who are the personas that purchase your product or service. Defining your target audience will help you focus not only on creating great content but on creating the right content. It makes it easier to create content that establishes you as an authority in your industry, rather than creating content for its own sake.

Why aren’t demographics enough to identify my target audiences?

Demographic data is essential, but it is not enough for defining a target audience. It’s why most companies don’t get the real image of their target market, target audience and work with incomplete or non-existing customer avatars.

Age, marital status, gender and location are good, but these are just the tip of the iceberg, and work hand in had with all the other psychographics elements your audience might be already telling you. Marketers will use demographic data, for example age and location when running an ad campaign that needs specific targeting. However if you want that group of people to react to your ad at all, then you need a more in depth information that will make your campaign relevant, and specific to what your consumers need to hear, see and feel in order to move to the next stage of their buyer journey.

This is why interests, frustrations, goals and pain points are so valued by marketers. It gives them powerful insights that make every campaign relate to your potential customer, your specific group of consumers, instead of every one on Earth.

So what’s a customer avatar?

A customer avatar is a fictional character that represents your ideal audience (target audience). It’s also known as a buyer persona, ideal customer. It’s very helpful because it gives you an idea of what kind of person might be using your product or service and what the value proposition will be when they do.

Most companies have the basic version of a customer avatar, which includes demographic information that tools like Google Analytics can provide. But for copywriting, the gold is in something called psychographic data. This includes things like pain points, frustrations, fears and challenges, values, lifestyle, emotions and needs.

How do I identify my target audience’s interests and pain points?

I’ve heard from many business owners that they thought the secret to their target audience profile coms from journaling about your ideal client. When in fact, this is a data-driven process that includes a very scientific method of getting all that information: market research.

“Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is a very important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness.” – Wikipedia

Without this, it’s like trying to fish with the wrong bait or no bait at all. You might be lucky, but is luck enough when running a business? Not really.

Both audience and market research are now affordable. Any business owner can perform this process without investing thousands of dollars. You have all of it on the click of a button.

If I know my target audiences do I still need a customer avatar?

The answer is a definite YES. Customer avatars give you insights that describe in depth your target audiences. Simply defining a target audience is not enough to be able to optimize your sales copy, offers or positioning as a brand.

Want to learn more about finding and working with your ideal customer (avatar, buyer persona etc) ? Click here

How do I use the customer avatar/personas in my marketing?

By creating AND using customer avatars or personas to define your audiences, your business will be able to identify ways in which your product or service can serve your audience’s needs and whether or not there are any features missing from it currently.

Instead of just talking about “your” product, you can talk directly to your target audience by mentioning things like what kind of car they drive or where they live in order to appeal more specifically towards certain demographics rather than trying to talk to everybody at the same time.

It helps with product development, improving sales copy and it is a weapon when it comes to content marketing.

Every bit of your marketing is going to benefit from this: your SEO strategy (what keywords to rank for), your blog content (what to actually write), your social media (what are the social media platforms your customers hang on), your hashtag game (what are the hashtags/topics they follow), your PR (what other people are they going to get information, advice, inspiration?).

Can I have multiple personas/avatars who purchase?

Yes, within your target audience you can have multiple personas or customer avatars among your buyers. Ideally you will focus most of your time and marketing on the persona that is easier and most profitable to convert.

For instance, your business can serve as a general group (target market) women who have a job in healthcare, but the target audience is made of women who are in a specific income level, eg earning $35k to $100k per year. Within that target audience you can have multiple segments or personas who could benefit from what you do. For instance, you can have pharmacists, biomedical engineers, various therapists, assistants, nurses. Out of all these people that you can serve, it’s likely that you can only really serve one or two.

Remember, it’s hard to be everything for everyone. Researching your persons demographics and psychographics and upgrading your marketing and products to better serve your specific consumer is time consuming.

How do I use data about my target audience to improve my website experience?

7 in 10 businesses flop because they fail to connect with their target audience. And if you have a website, that’s the first place to start to improve their experience and relationship with your brand. Your website needs to speak their language and cater to their needs, wants and objections. Your design elements will also reflect specific elements of your target audience. 74% of customers feel frustrated if your website does not cater to their needs. Also, your website needs to take into account your target audience’s shopping habits or buyer journey – do they go straight to the cart or do they need more nurturing before seeing the call to action button?

How do I use this data to improve my targeting for ads?

Did you know that $37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience (source)? If you’re running your own ads, I am sure you’ve felt more than once puzzled about what’s going on and concerned with the lack of results. And you know what? That can happen when you hire an agency or a professional to do it for you. Obviously there are many reasons your ads might not be performing. The first place to check whenever you’re investing in ads is to make sure you are targeting the right segment, the right groups, the right channels etc. In short, knowing your target audiences inside 0ut is key.

If your target audience is broad, identify the specific segments or personas that your business can help and make your ads very specific to their unique goals and challenges. This reflects in ad copy and design, as well as positioning of your offer. Finally, make sure it reflects in the ad setup. Here’s an example: if you sell books, your clients can be persons of any gender with a multitude of interests. With research you can find out that specific age groups like specific types of books, based on some of their every day roles (student, parent, career, life challenge or milestone, health etc).

Who isn’t in your target audience?

If this is the first time you’re giving this a serious thought, I can bet it feels overwhelming, but pretty exciting at the same time. To get started, I suggest a simple exercise: make a list of who isn’t in your target audience? Who can’t your business serve? Who can’t get the best results with what you do?

You’re not alone…

Business owners often struggle with defining their target audience because they’re too close to the business and don’t have a clear picture of who their customers are. They are missing the roadmap and instead of figuring it out, they skip some of the key elements of setting up their business for success.

I hope this target audience 101 has helped you answer some of the biggest questions around defining your audiences and gave you some idea on how to use this information to improve your marketing strategy so you can convert more consumers into buyers.

Let me know in the comments who isn’t and who is your target audience.