How to Find Your Target Audience

$37 billion is wasted every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience.

You don’t want to be part of this statistic, so what do you do?

The correct answer is segmenting your audience, but there is a lot to unpack there.

What are some types of audience segments?

Audiences can be segmented into categories based on intent, location, interests, and other things. Here are a few examples of what those types of segments can look like.

Interest

Segmenting by interest is useful for people that are building products around a person’s hobbies or extracurricular activities. LinkedIn allows users to segment their followers by the groups they are a part of which is a powerful tool for this type of segmenting.

Purchase Intention

Within Stripe (or whatever payment processes you use), you have access to your existing customer base. This will show you who has purchased, what they’ve purchased, and how many times they’ve purchased from you. Your email list will also give insights into who is clicking into your CTA links which can be useful when determining a person’s purchasing intent.

Location

This is an easy way to segment your audience based on their physical location. This could be useful for anybody that is building physical products or runs in-person meetups.

Four ways to determine your target audience

1. Identify trends through market research: Trends exist everywhere; it’s just up to you to find them. Look at trends for similar products to see how they are building, and put your own unique spin on it. Use Google Trends, Exploding Topics, and Trends to find trends before they become obvious.
2. Analyze the competition: You can learn a lot from those you compete against.
   1. What is their primary sales channel?
   2. Who are they selling to within the organization?
   3. What is their value proposition?
   4. How are they branding themselves?
3. Create personas: The more you can narrow down your ideal customer profile, the better off you are. Create 3-5 similar personas so you can A/B test who is most-likely to say “yes” to your offer.
4. Use Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the best tool to understand the types of people that are visiting your site. This type of information can be used to help you make informed decisions on where to invest more of your marketing efforts. We delayed setting up our Google Analytics, and we regret that decision. Don’t wait. Get it set up today.

Ten questions to ask yourself about your target audience

1. What industry do they work in?
2. What type of role within that industry?
3. Where do they live?
4. Where do they consume information?
5. How do they communicate?
6. What groups do they belong in?
7. How do they think?
8. What motivates them?
9. What are their incentives?
10. What challenges do they face in their day-to-day?

To get a template of the questions above, click here.