How To Define Your Target Audience (With Free Audience Template)

When you’re looking to connect with your ideal customer, you need to know how to define your target audience. This might seem like a daunting task, but without knowing who your target audience is, you could end up targeting the wrong type of customers, or people who aren’t interested in your offering. This can harm your brand and lead to poor sales.

Defining your target audience will guide how you tailor your messaging, craft compelling marketing campaigns and drive more results for your business.

In this blog, we’ll take you through the importance of understanding your target audience, as well as a step-by-step approach to defining this persona.. We’ll also look into audience profiling and how you can put it all together with our Free Target Audience Template

The Importance Of Understanding Your Target Audience

If you’re struggling to connect to your ideal customer, or feel like your messaging is falling flat, then it’s time to review who you are targeting and why.

So, what is a target audience?

To put it simply, a Target Audienceis a group of people that share the same qualities that you’re looking to target with your product or service. These are people that are at the forefront of every part of the business, from product development, to marketing. If your target audience isn’t defined, it could be costly for businesses, as they could end up:

• Creating products that the target audience doesn’t need
• Crafting brand messaging that falls flat
• Launching marketing campaigns that don’t resonate with potential customers
• Drive a lot of visitors to the site, but struggle to convert them

On the flip side, businesses that have defined target audiences can experience lucrative advantages by seeing:

• Higher conversion rates
• Clear brand messaging that customers trust>
• A loyal and returning customer base
• Successful marketing campaigns

Therefore, having defined target audiences is a crucial element of the business that, if done properly, can lead to long-term results.

Now, let’s look at how you can define your target audience.

How to Define Your Target Audience: A Step-by-Step Approach

Defining your Target Audience might seem like a complex exercise, so we’ve broken it down into a step-be-step process for you.

Step 1: Analyse Your Existing Customers

When it comes to defining your target audience, data is your best friend. If you already have records of people who have engaged with your brand, made purchases and the value they’ve brought to your business, use it!

If you’re not sure where to find this data, or want data that is more up-to-date, then you can pull insights from a range of channels to find these insights including your:

• Sales data from internal CRM systems
• Website analytics
• Social media metrics
• Customer reviews

Now you have the data, start asking these questions:

• Do our customers share any qualities?
• What are their demographics, interests and behaviours?
• Why did they choose you over a competitor?
• What are their pain points and challenges?

This will give you a strong starting point when it comes to understanding and defining your target audience.

Step 2: Conduct Market Research

Your current customer base is a good starting point to helping you define your target audience. Since you already have a pool of people who have discovered your brand and made a purchase/enquiry. If you have data that shows returning customers, you can use this too! As these are customers who are loyal to your brand.

Using this data, you can segment it into different demographics (i.e. age ranges, genders, locations). If you find your data is sitting in certain demographics, you can start to build a picture of what your target audience looks like. Alternatively, if the most popular demographics are not what you thought they’d be, your strategy might be misaligned with who your target audience really is.

However, the data doesn’t always show the full picture of who your target audience is. In fact, it’s not unusual to have multiple target audiences, so your current customer base might just be one ‘pool’ of your ideal customers.

Now, let’s look beyond the customer data and conduct some market research.

Market research allows businesses to understand current market trends, audience pain points and potential new areas they can tap into. There are a range of market research methods you can use including:

• Competitor Analysis
• Industry Reports
• Focus Groups>
• Trend Analysis

These different research methods allow you to see how you can tap into trends, how your business meets the current needs of different consumers, and uncover potential new audience segments.

Step 3: Identify Your Ideal Customer

Now you have your customer data and market research, you can start building the picture on your target audience. One way to do this is through making a buyer persona

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer as a single person. You might have several buyer personas to help you build your target audience, but let’s start with your first one to begin with.

Your buyer persona will encompass everything about this single person, even parts that might not be directly related to the product/service you’re offering. However, these segments are crucial to helping you envision your ideal customer.

Let’s look into how to build your buyer persona.

Using Buyer Personas To Understand Your Target Audience

Our step-by-step process has helped you to define your target audience. Now, we’ll take a more in-depth look at your target audience through building a buyer persona.

This buyer persona exercise allows you to have a deeper understanding of who your target audience is, which influences how targeted you can be with your communications.

There are 4 main elements to a buyer persona:

1. Demographics: interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, lifestyle, personality.
2. Behaviours: online habits, purchasing patterns, media consumption, brand interactions.
3. Pain Points: unfulfilled needs, challenges, problems they’re trying to solve.
4. Motivations: what drives their decisions and their aspirations.

Tip: give your buyer persona a name. This helps you to humanise and envision your target audience as a living person who would interact with your business.

Buyer Persona Example

Now, let’s look at an example of a buyer persona:

Imagine you’re the owner of an ecommerce business that specialises in outdoor apparel and camping accessories. Your top-sellers are your hard-wearing, light-weight, super-comfortable adult walking boots and you’ve just released your first edition of these for children and teens.

Name: Hannah The Family Adventurer

Demographics:

• Mother of two children aged 8 and 13.
• Owns a large dog.
• Enjoys a UK staycation, especially camping trips where there are scenic walks for her family and dog.
• Part of a local walking group and regularly goes to yoga classes.
• Believes the great outdoors is crucial for a happy and healthy lifestyle.
• Wants to continue creating fond camping memories for her family.

Behaviours:

• Part of social media groups about the best walks and camping sites in the UK.
• Frequently purchases the latest recipe books for healthy meals for her family.<
• Always on the hunt for a good deal, but will invest in quality-made pieces that last.
• Will purchase from second-hand clothing sites and charity shops to lessen her carbon footprint.

Pain Points:

• Although she loves her long walks, she needs walking shoes that give her added support to avoid her feet being in pain.
• Struggles to find quality made walking shoes that provide the comfort she needs, but are also hard-wearing for most terrains in the UK.
• She wants a brand that she can trust for not only her, but for her children as well.

You can add more detail to your buyer persona, in fact, the more detailed, the better! The key to these buyer personas is to help you understand who your target  audience is.

Now, let’s put it into practice with our Free Target Audience Template.

Target Audience Template: Putting It All Together

Our step-by-step process and buyer persona examples have hopefully provided you with a starting point to help you define your target audience. You can use our free target audience template below to help you map out your buyer persona and bring it to life.

It’s important to take your time with this exercise, as having a defined target audience can allow you to create tailored messages, uplift brand awareness and reinforce trust and loyalty in your products/services.

What Is Negative Buyer Persona?

Defining your target audience helps you to direct your efforts towards the right people for your business. Through buyer persona exercises, you can understand your target audience more in-depth, as though they’re a living human. Alternatively, you can also look at how to avoid targeting people who are not bringing value to your business. This is known as a negative buyer persona

Whilst a typical buyer persona builds a picture of audiences you want to actively target, a negative buyer persona identifies audiences that

• Don’t bring value to the business
• Don’t align with brand values
• Are costly for the business
• Wasting time and business resources

Identifying audiences who you don’t want to target can help improve your targeting, refine your messaging and streamline your budgets towards areas that are bringing value to the business.

For instance, you might be targeting audiences who convert, but at very high acquisition costs that are not sustainable. Or, you identify you get a lot of traffic from certain demographics, but they never convert. This pool of people might go in your negative audience persona.

Similar to how you define your target audience, you can follow these steps to help you build negative buyer personas:

Using Data For Negative Buyer Personas

Once again, data is your best friend when it comes to audiences. If you’re an ecommerce business you can use this exercise to identify people who:

• Add items to their cart but never checkout
• Purchased once and never again
• Purchased and returned their item
• Waited a long time to make a purchase

You can further dissect this data to see how much it cost the business to acquire this customer, or just to get them to the website. If you find that the acquisition cost isn’t sustainable, then these aren’t the right audiences for your business.

You also don’t want to be spending budget, time and resources to drive people to your site who are “online window shoppers.” These are people that seem interested in what you’re offering, and come to the site, but they rarely make a purchase. If you find a pool of data that is showing you this, add this to your buyer persona to help you refocus your marketing efforts towards your true target audience instead.

Building A Negative Buyer Persona Profile

Once you have identified pools of people, either through your data or other types of research, then you can start to build your negative buyer persona. Similar to buyer personas for your target audience, you need to flesh out who this ‘person’ is in terms of:

• Demographics
• Behaviours and interests
• Pain points

Now that you understand your negative buyer persona more clearly, you can start to steer your efforts away from the people who don’t bring value to your business. This means you can refocus your resources towards your target audience instead.

How To Define Your Target Audience (With Free Audience Template)

Gathering everything that we’ve talked about in this blog post, you hopefully feel more confident about defining your target audience. Having a defined target audience is crucial, as it influences all aspects of your business. It can be lucrative if it’s done right, or costly if it’s ignored.

Our step-by-step approach provides you with a clear guide on how to define your target audience, from analysing your existing customer base, to conducting market research, to identifying who your ideal customer is – also known as a buyer persona.

We then put this into practice by building buyer personas to understand your target customer more in-depth. This deeper understanding allows you to see how your products/services address the pain points of your target audience, and how you can communicate this to them with tailored messaging.

You can use our free target audience template to help you map out your buyer personas.

If you’re looking for help with understanding your target audience and building a strong brand, get in touch with our marketing team today.