How to Find Your Target Audience

Although the holidays are quickly approaching and 2022 is winding down, there is still plenty of time to find your perfect target audience before the new year commences. We certainly don’t live up to Santa’s elves, but we’ve packaged together our top deployable tips for finding your target users and sharpening your content marketing strategy. After all, if Santa can seize the attention of and find his target audience (families all over the world), then so can you!

What is a Target Audience?

Before we jump into our tips, we want to provide you with a brief definition of ‘target audience’ so that you can understand how this concept directly applies to your brand. A target audience is a selective group of people who have specific wants, needs, or interests that directly correspond to your product and its functioning. 

The Importance of Creating a Target Persona

Small but mighty, target audiences hold great value for brands and their success as you can strategically cater your messaging to your target audience to attract their attention. Identifying your target audience will allow you to fully direct your marketing and financial attention to the group that is most likely to engage with your product. Creating a target persona will also enable you to save time, resources, and energy that would have otherwise been spent elsewhere on groups that are less likely to purchase from you.  Now, onto our tips!

Market Research to Understand Your Target Audience

Market research is the process of gathering more information about the general elements of your target audience and is vital to understanding who exactly your target audience is and how you can adjust your content marketing efforts to capture their attention. Market research consists of a few important components:

Quantitative Research

• Statistics

• Surveys

• ABAB Testing

• Social Media Analytics

Using statistics to find your target audience is a very effective way to obtain an accurate picture of your exact consumer needs in addition to increasing engagement. By embedding surveys, ABAB testing, and other data-oriented strategies, you can better understand who your product most benefits and appeals to, along with thoroughly discerning your consumers’ priorities. 

Qualitative Research

• Consumer behavior analysis

• Interviews

• Customer Feedback

• Content Analysis

Consumer behavior analysis, interviews, current consumer feedback, and more qualitative-oriented approaches can be instrumental in uncovering your target users and even in understanding how your product can be adjusted to meet their needs. 

Helpful hint: Issuu allows you to track statistics related to your product with just a few clicks! Watch our video tutorial to learn how. 

Segmenting Your Target Audience 

Segmenting your target audience means that you carefully split your audience into different subgroups in order to better target their distinct characteristics. Audiences can be broken up by profession, geography, age, background, basically whatever defining characteristics you believe will allow you to tailor-make your marketing efforts. It is important to note that these subgroups do not have to be permanent; over time, you may discover through marketing research that certain groups can be combined or additional subgroups can be created to address even more precise needs. 

Target Audience & Segmentation Examples 

Example #1 – Soccer players

• Product: Soccer (Football) Cleats

• Target Audience: Soccer Players

• Segmented Target Audience: Soccer players in the United States, soccer players who play professionally, soccer players over a certain income, etc.

Example #2 – Vegan and plant-based eaters

• Product: Vegan Magazine

• Target Audience: Vegan eaters

• Segmented Target Audience: Vegan eaters in the surrounding area of a particular restaurant, plant-based eaters who like to read, social justice/climate activists who may be interested in veganism, etc. 

Want to learn more about target audiences and how to attract their attention? Finally, join Issuu today and start using Issuu Statistics to start finding your target audience through market research!