You Want To Find New, High-value Customers Using Their Data. Which Audience Solution Should You Use?

How practise you ensure you are delivering the right message to the right people at the right time?

Identifying your target audience is the foundation of your marketing strategy. This entails understanding who your ideal prospects and customers are, who are your competitors equally well as the core pain points that your production or service solves.

We reached out to 48 marketers to observe out how they research and place their target audiences, and so we've put together what we learned in this post, including:

What Is a Target Audition?
ix Proven Ways to Identify Your Target Audience
All-time Analytics and Market Enquiry Tools for Conducting Audience Enquiry
How to Plough Your Audience Insights into Detailed Customer Personas

Google Analytics Audience Overview Dashboard Template by Databox

What is a Target Audience?

Creating a target audience is essential for knowing where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. This helps you lot to understand who your target customer is and what they intendance about. This can include:

Where they hang out on and offline?
How do they similar to communicate?
What is their demographic information (ex: age range, expertise, location, task title, hobbies, etc.)
What are their psychographic information (i.e., behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, etc.)
What pain points your product or service solves?

For example, if you accept a SaaS product that helps IT professionals manage file-sharing across mobile devices, your target audience might look something like this:

It Directors with ten+ years of experience working in IT at enterprise firms
$100k+ bacon
Near likely men. who are married with 2+ kids
Spends downtime on Reddit and Twitter
Biggest pain signal – how transmission and time-intensive the current file-sharing processes are

When we conducted our latest survey, we plant that target audience research was most helpful with content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO efforts.

which area is audience research most important?

ix Tactics to Identify Your Target Audience

Now that you have a better understanding of what target audition means, here are 9 tactics to help you lot find your target audience.

First with your current customers
Call back benefits non features
Collect demographic data on your target audition
Send out customer surveys
Look for trends in online client feedback
Become niche
Research your competitors
Create a market positioning map
Resist the urge to overcomplicate it

PRO TIP: How to Measure if Your Website is Alluring the Right Audience

If you want to know if your website is attracting high-quality visitors that are relevant to your brand, in that location are several audition metrics you can rail from Google Analytics that volition give you lot a pretty adept offset.

Sessions by Country: Is your content attracting the right visitors by geolocation?
Average Session Duration: The more than time visitors spend on your website and/or specific pages, the higher the likelihood they're more relevant to your company.
Bounce Rate: Practise visitors leave shortly after landing on your website? Or do they stick around, engage with the element on your folio/website, before moving on?
Pageviews: The more pages someone views, over again, the higher the likelihood that they're finding your content relevant.
New vs. Returning Users: If people are returning to your website at a proficient pct, you're obviously making a proficient and relevant outset impression.

If you want to runway these in Google Analytics, you might observe the visualizations limiting. It'due south likewise a bit time-consuming to combine all the metrics you need in one view.

Nosotros've made this easier by building a plug-and-play dashboard that takes your Google Analytics data and automatically visualizes the correct metrics to give yous an in-depth analysis of your website's audience.

ga_audience_overview_dashboard_template_featured_section

With this Google Analytics Audience dashboard, yous can quickly acquire who is visiting your site and details such as:

Where are visitors viewing your site? (website sessions by country)
What demographics of users are coming to your site? (sessions by affinities)
What are your visitor'southward favorite mobile devices? (sessions by device)
How long exercise visitors stay on your site? (average session duration)

And more…

You can hands fix information technology up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To prepare up the dashboard, follow these three simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template

Step ii: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox.

Step 3: Scout your dashboard populate in seconds.

1. Start with your current customers

Maria Mora of Big Body of water, says, "Before you tin can identify your target web audition, you need to understand your target customer. We begin with a deep dive with the sales and marketing teams to understand what their client base has looked similar in the past, and what their aspirational client base looks like. Then you can take tactical measures to attract and connect with that audience online."

"Look at the characteristics of your best existing customers and organize that list into at least i profile based on shared characteristics," said David Hoos of The Good. Some good metrics include those with the largest deal sizes, the longest retentiveness, and the easiest customers to work with."

"Brands should get an authentic report on their electric current customers," says Chachi Flores of Peacock Alley. "Past running an RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary) assay on your current clientele, this tin can aid pinpoint your hereafter target audition. RFM can aid categorize your target audition into specific levels of buying potential."

Bobby Reed of Capitol Tech Solutions elaborates on this approach.

"I would interruption down your customers into multiple segments if possible," said Reed. "Discover the customers that are the top gross acquirement for the least corporeality of work. Also, find the customers that may not be the most assisting, but that are repeat customers that continue the daily operations funded. And find out which customer segments yous may really lose coin on, and justify if in that location is a need to market place to that customer segment. Knowing who yous currently work with gives yous the opportunity to actually build upon and accomplish more of that target audience.

I would also consider if there is any new business concern you are going after. If so, how do your existing customers fit into that new segment, and can you convert those customers outset? So look at your competitors in that space, and see how they are marketing to those potential new customers, and determine your niche."

In addition, previous customers can also provide useful data and insights.

David Silverman of Solution Loans says, "Have a wait back through your database of previous customers (this can even be offline customers if yous are just starting out with a website) and try to spot trends. Are a large percentage of your current customers, male person/female? What is the average age? Is in that location anything else that stands out, such as employment status, etc.?"

2. Think benefits not features

Steve Pritchard of Orlando Villa Holidays says, "The best way to work out which consumers to target is to identify who has a demand or interest in your product or website and then begin narrowing it downwardly from there. Start past pinpointing all of the different features and qualities of your offering, then accept a think well-nigh who would benefit from these features.

If information technology'south a blog or website, this might be having specialist knowledge in a niche area, having a trusted and unbiased perspective, or a special widget that makes your site easy to use and detect information from.

Related: A Foolproof Way to Reach And Engage Your Target Audience Through Your Company'southward Blog

When you begin to sympathize the benefits of your site, you can begin to understand who would value these features. For instance, older travelers who are slightly technophobic would do good from a website with a helpful widget that allows them to compare deals hands. Similarly, avid travelers would value an unbiased blog, which gives them honest holiday tips. From hither, you tin can begin to target the people you know will get the most benefit out of using this site."

Adam Cole of Grant Park Academy of the Arts recommends using this thought experiment.

"Think of yourself as the solution to someone's problem," says Cole."Whose problem are you the solution for? Who has the problem, and what is your solution?

"To place your target audition for your site, you have to go backward, starting with your final goal," says Minuca Elena. "Who could buy what yous are selling? Even if you lot sell services or you sell products (your own products or as an chapter), there is even so a auction involved. Ask yourself who are your ideal clients, what profession or hobbies do they have, gender, age, income, topics of interests, etc. For instance, let'due south say you are selling baby gear, then your target audience is young moms, with an historic period between 25-twoscore years old, that are searching for parenting advice.

3. Collect demographic data on your target audience

Ross Kernez says, "To better empathize the customer, I would advise marketers up draw upward their demographic portrait. This process is a bit similar creating a character in the video game Sims: at the beginning, yous take a digital person with a nada background, simply gradually he has a firm, work, hobbies, and friends. It is important to brand the portrait as detailed every bit possible so that the abstract customer turns into an old acquaintance. Also, if yous take direct competitors, it will exist logical to wait for the target audience among their subscribers on social networks. You can add together potential customers equally friends and invite them to your group, write private messages, or ready targeted advertising on them."

"Collect data on user beliefs, location, and demographics," says Cierra Flythe of BoardActive. "Expanding your user profile gives a website insight into the type of user that does/does non engage and interact. Once you back your website marketing with user data, it is much easier to segment campaigns effectively."

David LaVine of RocLogic Marketing mentions, "For B2B, go beyond demographics & firmographic data. While this is helpful, yous'll demand to get beyond information like job titles, industries, and company size. If you lot desire your website to perform for you, you'll need to understand the indicators that let you lot separate your audition from someone that looks like they're your audience. These will oft come up in the form of either their (i) skills or (2) interests."

Collect demographic data on your target audience

4. Send out customer surveys

Anna Rubkiewicz of Survicate says, "One of the best methods is running surveys to discover out who the leads who convert to customers actually are. Afterward all, your target audience should be the people who discover your services of value – even if you're currently targeting a different group with your website messaging."

For example, Rubkiewicz recently ran a survey looking to empathize what blog readers wanted to get from their articles and newsletters.

"Nosotros ran a survey on some of our nearly popular articles on the web log and were astonished to collect over 600 answers – just within 3 days," said Rubkiewicz. "You can imagine how many insights that gave us as to which content we should write to make a difference for our target audience and turn them into prospects.

Nick Maynard of Ridgeway agrees, "Talk to your electric current customers. Build a survey with ane of the many free survey tools (Google Forms is an obvious starting place) aimed at identifying key personas and combine with Audience data from your analytics."

5. Look for trends in online customer feedback

Patricio Quiroz of Lawmaking Authority says, "Y'all desire first to identify what is the purpose of your product or service. Really take some fourth dimension on researching and finding the benefits that your product or service provides. Then yous will identify who exactly is buying or in demand of your particular services. Then you tin get to popular online forums like Reddit or Quora to see who exactly is asking questions or interested in that manufacture/niche. This volition help you pinpoint what age group, gender, and manufacture that your target audience might exist in. One time you have narrowed down who this audition might be, you lot will be in a amend position to market place specifically for this grouping of people."

"If y'all have yet to identify the segment y'all virtually resonate with, focus on distribution and user studies," says Yaniv Masjedi of Nextiva."Promote your content amongst new audiences, and then engage with and read user feedback. From there, you'll begin to notice trends in which demographics almost align with your content. And, you'll have insights into how to best tailor it to them.

vi. Go niche

Jason Yau of CanvasPeople says, "Know your niche and own it. Spend the majority of your time focusing on all things related to your website. Your target audition should be hyper-focused considering that is who volition virtually likely be interested in your products or services. Have a specific plan of action with your targeted audience, and stick to that program."

Jake Hay of PopShorts agrees, "Define a group of people you want to reach with your marketing message. Really narrow down and define who you are trying to appeal to. It is impossible to target anybody, then the more specific yous become, the better. Your website will gain much more attention if information technology solely appeals to your designated target audience."

"Join every forum, Facebook group, subreddit that you can. Immerse yourself in the community, understand your customer's problems, meet the world through their lens," says Tung Dao of Avada Commerce.

Hazel Pan of The Content Brewery adds, "Join trade associations, nourish events, bring together groups and forums where your target audience hang out. Listen to podcasts, Q&Every bit, etc. Lurk and mind to their stories, issues, etc. Collaborate if yous have something of value to offer for gratis. DON'T sell or promote anything when you're in this enquiry stage. In one case you lot've gathered enough information nigh your target audition'south pain points, you can then build your website to answer those questions and provide solutions to their problems."

7. Research your competitors

Ellie Pearce of Whoever You Need says, "My number i tip is ever to go on a close eye on your contest. If there are companies that are selling a similar production to yourself and have been doing so for years, then they already know your audience very well.

Look at their social media platforms, the type of people that regularly like their posts, and what is the blazon of content that gets a lot of response?

Likewise, see if you are able to observe the areas that aren't working so well. Inquire yourself, how can you better it? Go an idea of the blog manufactures that they are regularly posting. Can yous create a similar commodity on your ain products?

Compiling this forth with the information you already take on electric current customers tin can help broaden your audience reach to a group of characteristics that you may not take even considered before."

viii. Create a marketplace positioning map

Alex McCormick of Checklate says, "A adept way to place a target market for your website is to use a market assay method known every bit market mapping. This is a simple diagram that allows you lot to identify gaps in the market or industry your product/service/website operates in."

McCormick shares the steps for conducting this analysis.

Depict a y and x-centrality on a folio with the two overlappings in the center to requite you lot iv different sections.
Label one centrality with age and another with income level.
Plot all of your competitors on this nautical chart based on their customer base.

"Once you lot've finished plotting all your relevant competitors, await for where there are large empty spaces on the chart," says McCormick. "This is where at that place is a gap in the market. Where there are lots of brands, clustered together shows that a market place is oversaturated. By assessing this, you may find that at that place are enough of websites catering to formal, experienced professionals, but few that serve casual professionals. Or, perhaps you'll find that there are websites catering to professionals of all feel levels, but few who serve those with a casual interest. This makes information technology easy for y'all to find a niche."

ix. Resist the urge to overcomplicate it

"Gary Stevens from Hosting Canada adds information technology is easy to overthink it,

"What type of person would be most motivated to respond to your call to action? "says Stevens. "Even thinking on a granular level, such as thinking of just one person, tin can be extremely helpful. If your friend Todd is the outset person you recollect of when y'all recall about who would reply your call to action, then your side by side step would be to effigy out what type of audience Todd belongs to."

All-time Analytics and Market Research Tools For Conducting Audience Research

In our survey and inquiry, we found that marketers were relying on many target audience tools to collect user feedback and assist with audience research. The nigh popular tools were: Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Hotjar.

Best Analytics and Market Research Tools For Conducting Audience Research

Google Analytics: Leverage Google Analytics Insights

Google Analytics is usually the first identify that marketers go to when looking for audience insights.

Alice Nelson-Smith of The London School of Brand-Up says, "No matter how much research you practice, you cannot truly know who your audition is until y'all see who is visiting your site, whereas Google Analytics lets y'all know exactly this.

In one case you have this knowledge, you tin can adjust your digital marketing campaigns accordingly, or fifty-fifty branch out and target a new market and new demographics along the mode, every bit your audition is not ever the one you might await."

"Look at your electric current audition," says Juliana Weiss-Roessler of WR Digital Marketing. "Who is currently visiting? How long are they staying? If it doesn't marshal with the intended target audience, then you probable need to shift your content marketing strategy."

Claire Shaner of ZooWho says, "Though at first, it might simply include a few data points, check out your Google Analytics audition data. If you're running digital ads for your production, look at where the all-time conversions are coming from. Start to build out a "buyer persona" from the data y'all have. And then fill in the blanks with your all-time guess. Narrow your audience as y'all go. When starting time starting a website, you won't have that much data nearly your audience. As you get more traffic, you can become amend information about who's visiting."

"One of the best ways to identify the people who visit your website would be leveraging various analytics tools," says Osiris Parikh of Top Mindfulness. "Google Analytics, in particular, allows you to visualize the boilerplate time spent on the site, the countries that traffic has originated from, and what device they are using to visit the site. This culmination of data can permit businesses to have a comprehensive profile into their audience and their behavior."

James Dyble of Global Sound Group adds, "If the website is already alive and is getting traffic, then I would recommend using Google analytics to make up one's mind who your audience is. If it is not however live, then you lot could check your competitors' websites and practice research to notice out who they target."

Laura Gonzalez of Audi Las Vegas agrees, "Google Analytics is a great and free mode to encounter some demographic characteristics of your audition. You can see your audiences' age, location, device (mobile or desktop), as well every bit some primal statistics that chronicle to these figures. Y'all can come across how long each historic period range and gender spend on your site and which specific pages they tend to visit the most and to the lowest degree."

"Utilize the Demographics department of Google Analytics to its full capabilities," says Dominique Martinez of Tandem Interactive. "There'southward and so much information in Google Analytics accounts to provide you with plenty of information to infer who your target audience is."

McCall Robison of Best Visitor adds how he uses the Demographics Insights inside Google Analytics. (i.e. Google Analytics > Audience > Demographics.)

"You can delve into a demographic overview of your audience," says Robison. "This includes a breakup of the percentage of users that are male or female and what historic period groups they fall under. You can also find out what per centum of your visitors are new visitors and returning visitors. This tells you if you need to do more for your audience to incentivize them to come up back. If y'all go to Audience > Geo, you tin too notice out where the bulk of your audience is coming from. This includes the countries also equally a specific country breakdown. This is a not bad mode to get an overview of your audition and to beginning tailoring your content towards that audience."

Robison also uses the Affinity Category.

"I like to employ Google Analytics Analogousness Category, which y'all can notice past going to Audience > Interests > Analogousness Categories," says Robison. "This will requite you a percentage breakdown of that specific audience'southward interests, including news and politics, banking and finance, media and amusement, Do-Information technology-Yourselfers, etc. The more than you know most your audition, the improve you tin can tailor your content to fit their needs.

Tim Brown of Hook Agency agrees, "For finding your website'south target audience, I strongly recommend creating content and checking your analytics to see who is viewing it. Then make tweaks to the content to accommodate your ideal customer."

Further reading: Everything You Tin Learn from Your Google Analytics Audience Overview Report

Take it a Pace Farther and Set Up Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics

Ivan Teh of AdVisible says, "By connecting your Google Analytics account with your ecommerce store, you can easily find your exact target audience based on your conversion data. Only enable merely the 'Converters' segment in any report, and information technology will show data for the users that converted on your ecommerce website.

If you take newsletter sign-ups or other goals, you may want to create new segments based on transaction data just; otherwise, y'all tin can simply select the segment of users that 'Made A Purchase.' From here, you will exist able to get into each audience written report and observe out exactly what age range your real customers mainly consist of, what gender they have identified as, what topics they are most interested in, their physical location, device they used to purchase, and much more.

The good thing is that you are non but limited to Audition Data, but you tin too observe out which channels perform the best, which pages your existent customers went to and stayed on the folio the longest, which page they normally convert on, etc. through Conquering, platforms the audience have visited earlier the final conversion and Beliefs reports."

Katie Weedman of THAT Agency says, "Install the Google Analytics tracking code and the Facebook pixel on your website, so y'all can obtain existent data about your website visitors."

Come across more than: How to Set Upwards & Use Google Analytics Conversion Tracking

Facebook Advertising Tools: Analyze your social media platform insights

Paul Fairbrother of AdEspresso likes to use Facebook Audition Insights tool to analyze his Facebook page fans.

"The basics are there such as their historic period, gender, and location just also much more information including human relationship status, education level, job titles, the almost pop other pages that they like and most popular page categories," says Fairbrother. "This will allow you lot to build buyer personas for your website even if yous've never run any Facebook ads, and it's completely free to utilize."

Joe Gast of Truck Driver Institute says, "It'southward important to leverage your existing marketing tools, such as Facebook. Facebook advertising tools tin analyze your current website traffic with its Pixel tool, and allow you to make custom audiences based on traffic to certain webpages or people that have performed specific actions on your site. Facebook'south demographic targeting options are too a great option for reaching the target audience for your site.

For example, if you sell pencils, endeavour advertising to a few dissimilar interests based audiences, like students, accountants, pencil collectors etc. See which audiences are more than successful and narrow it down until you accept constitute an audition that works the best."

"Look through your social media insights to see who engages the near with your content, and that should be your target audition," says Charles Kahlila of Tandem Interactive.

Colette Nataf of Lightning AI recommends taking this a step further.

"To discover your perfect audience, y'all need to exam different groups on Facebook and so employ that data to make informed decisions," says Nataf.

Tzvi Fried of Logomotive, agrees, "To find the audience for your website, exam unlike interests related to your brand on Facebook Advertising. For example, if y'all sell pencils, try ad to a few different interest-based audiences, like students, accountants, pencil collectors, etc. Run across which audiences are more successful and narrow it down until you have plant an audience that works the best."

SEO Tools and Keyword Research Tools

Jordan Terry of TorHoerman La says, "SEO tools provide precise, empirical data – and data doesn't lie. Information technology may take multiple tools to target your exact marketplace, depending on the specificity of your topic, product, or service. But these tools volition unbiasedly provide you with a clear-cut reply to "who should I market to and how?". It took me a long fourth dimension to come to terms with this fact. Now that I have accepted it and become proficient in marketing tools, my job is much easier."

"Concentrate on the keywords," says Andrei Vasilescu of DontPayFull. "Boost your SEO bulldoze for the best keywords of your business and see how those keywords are working. The people who search for your keywords or anything near to your keywords will be your target audience. Then, pick i or two visitors to your website and intensely enquiry on them to create your persona."

Dorian Reeves of SH1FT says, "Use tools like Serpstat, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to analyze what keywords your competitors are ranking for. This will give you lot an idea of what type of content yous can create, what keywords to rank for, and meet what your target audience responds to."

Related: The 24 All-time Keyword Tracking Tools (According to 107 SEOs)

View Audience Insights in Hubspot

Anna Kaine of ESM Inbound says, "You need to use a tool such as HubSpot, which monitors audience beliefs. You might not know the verbal features of your audience at beginning, such as age, gender, and income, simply you'll be able to discover much more useful details, such as where visitors click on your site, how far down each of your pages they scroll, which links are getting a high percentage of clicks, and whether your content offering or subscription forms are being submitted. When you starting time to find patterns in how existing visitors are behaving, y'all can target other people in this group who haven't constitute you yet more specifically."

Turn Your Audience Insights Into Detailed Customer Personas

Building out client personas is a way to easily digest all of the market research and audience insights you uncovered. This can go all the way down to creating a specific character or characters – such as Enterprise Ed or Small Business concern Sally – which personifies all of the fundamental traits and characteristics of your target audience.

According to our survey data, nosotros discovered that well-nigh 67% of marketers create personas to help bulldoze marketing efforts on a regular basis.

Turn Your Audience Insights Into Detailed Customer Personas

Levi Olmstead says, "When creating customer personas, call up about everyone who uses your website. Then break it downward into subgroups. For each subset, build-out exactly their persona. Their hurting points, their bug, their needs. This will help you deliver each persona the all-time content that satisfies their wants and needs."

Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers provides a tactical approach to building buyer personas.

"Create three to vi profiles of people that would be interested in your product or services," said Aufray. "Hither are a few questions y'all could ask yourself:

Male or female?
How former are they
Where are they from?
What are their hobbies?
What are their jobs?
How much do they earn?
Are they single or married?
Do they take children?

Alistair Dodds of Ever Increasing Circles shares the process he uses for his client avatar worksheets beneath.

Work with your founder(southward), sales, and marketing teams to identify who they picture equally their target audition.
Identify their gender, age, interests, shopping habits, blogs, and influencers they follow, marital status, family condition, career, education level, and so on. Place what problems they have that your product/service will solve.
Then road test your assumptions using Facebook Insights to encounter where to notice the audience y'all have identified.

Pro Tip: You can install a Facebook pixel then you can build a custom audience of site visitors.

Road exam advert creative through a achieve targeting campaign to measure out engagement levels and examination the results of your client avatar process.
Compare your findings with Google Analytics Audience Data so y'all can place the demographics of your site visitors.

Gloria Lafont of Action Marketing Co sums information technology upwardly nicely."It's about being very clear on who can yous help, what volition y'all help them achieve, and how will you get the job done," said Lafont. "Once you are clear on those 3 points, it will be easy to determine what your target audience has in mutual, and the right marketing message to communicate how you assistance them."

Doing the difficult piece of work upfront to identify your target audience will help you hone your brand messaging and marketing strategy. This becomes a solid foundation that you lot tin can utilise to grow your brand.