Finding your online target audience

Successful online marketing begins with knowing how to find your target audience. Determining your online target audience, the type of information they value and knowing where they spend most of their time can help businesses focus their marketing initiatives more effectively.

Defining a target audience can also help businesses create not only good content but the right content. Here are some tactics that can help find an online target audience:

Create reader personas
Creating reader personas can help identify the motivations and curiosities of readers, and therefore establish what they want to read online. A good reader persona covers the basic details of who, what, when, where and why. However, specific details are still necessary. Where possible, include characteristics like gender; personality; family life; job title and function; income and needs.

Conduct user surveys
User surveys are a great tool to help maintain an understanding of what customers are thinking and what they want. Businesses can translate survey feedback into a deeper understanding of their target audience. To make a user survey as useful as possible, include specific that are short and easy to answer.

Monitor your social accounts
Knowing which social networks your readers, customers and followers share content the most can reveal what they like and want to hear about. Finding this kind of information can be as simple as monitoring a business’s social accounts and making notes of who is interacting with the content.

Talk to your social followers
Businesses can learn a lot by being an active member on social media. Make the effort to respond to comments and messages you receive, as every interaction with an audience member is an opportunity to learn more about them. Find relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups to participate in and occasionally create posts asking what your audience is interested in.