What is an audience?
Your audience is the group of people who are the most likely to be interested in your product or service. Some companies have a very wide and diverse audience, containing people of all ages, educational levels, and genders, while others have a smaller audience.
Companies often think about their audience in terms of buyer personas, which helps guide their marketing campaigns.
When it comes to understanding your audience, there’s a range of factors you should look at, including:
- Gender
- Age
- Profession
- Location
- Education
- Income
- Marital status
For example, if many members of your audience are highly educated, married, and male, these common factors would be part of one of your buyer personas.
Benefits of knowing your audience
Knowing your audience is fundamental in ecommerce, like in any business. Even when you’re at the early stages of designing your products, you should be thinking about how to make them appeal to a certain target audience.
You also need to create your marketing strategy and messages with certain audiences in mind. The group you’re communicating with determines the tone, words, and aesthetics your marketing messages should use.
The characteristics of your audience also determine which channels you should use to deliver your marketing messages. If, for example, your audience is made up of older consumers, you’ll probably want to use Facebook rather than Tiktok.
Once you’re aware of your overall audience base, you can start to segment them into smaller groups. This helps you tailor your messages even more specifically.
How to find your target audience?
It’s crucial to uncover the right audiences to target with different personalized messages. The trick is to find audience segments that have some characteristic(s) in common.
Luckily, it’s easy to create a well-defined target audience when you have the right tools and processes. All you have to do is follow these steps:
- Gather behavioral data: Check out how your audience tends to behave while browsing your site by using software like Google Analytics and HotJar. This can help you find segments of customers who behave in similar ways. It’s best to focus on segments that are leaking from your funnel (i.e. failing to convert) in high numbers.
- Analyze your competitors: Take a look at the messaging strategies that your competitors are using. A similar brand will likely have a similar target audience and similar customer segments.
- Ask your visitors directly: An underrated strategy for segmentation is simply asking your customers what they’re shopping for. OptiMonk’s quiz funnel feature makes it easy to get quality information and feedback from your visitors.
- Segment your audience: Using your data, group your audience into segments that are all at a certain stage of the buying process, interested in the same type of product, or from the same geographic location.
- Create buyer personas: Based on all the info you have, come up with buyer personas for each of your segments. This will make it easier to create messages that resonate with each group.
- Continuously revise: You should always evaluate whether the segments you’re targeting are actually responding to your messaging. You can improve your targeting strategy by continually refining your segments and buyer personas.