The Real Truth About Knowing Your Target Audience Well
According to Neil Patel “Defining your target audience is the first and most essential step towards success for any company or business, especially if you are just getting started”.
Audience knowledge is important because it helps you relate with the audience, and inspires cross-pollination of ideas. Also, you get to know their pain points and aspirations, and you can accurately characterize their persona. Eventually, you can even correctly locate them online, and on social media.
Let’s start with the fundamentals. Quite simply said, the target audience for your blog is the set of visitors who will benefit the most from it.
And are they will most likely form a relationship with it.
So,the biggest accomplishment of your blog is the development of a strong following among readers.
In fact, it is documented that it costs significantly more to acquire new consumers than it does to retain existing customers. This is particularly important when you want to monetize your affiliate marketing blog quickly.
What does that imply for you?
It implies that if you want to keep getting shared and promoted before new readers, you need a loyal following of readers.
What Are The Benefits Of Knowing Your Target Audience?
Need For Relatability
Essentially, knowing who you’re writing for, will help you write posts that those people will relate with, and find valuable.
As a content creator, you yourself need a reference point too.
And so, one reference point could be your “expertise or passion” for a subject.
But that reference point has an inherent limitation. You could end up writing solely for yourself,and not for the audience.
But that’s a big no-no.
So let’s see the alternative.
Building A Target Audience
Instead of making a topic-expertise your reference, it’s much better when you make your reader(target audience) the reference point.
Then you’ll find yourself writing for the individual, who will actually read your content. But that’s only possible when you define a target audience.
So now your reference point for your blog becomes that individual for whom you’re writing.
This may not seem self-evident. But if you take a closer look at any blog you’ll notice that it isn’t about marketing exclusively. Rather, it’s much more about credibility through relationships.
In fact, experienced bloggers go the extra mile to develop a “target audience persona”.
Now, what’s that?
A target audience persona portrays a typical target audience member.
They’re imaginary personalities based on behavioral data and information gathered by knowing your followers on an individual basis.
The fact is that the audience persona is an individual.
This means that, like all individuals, they are more concerned about issues and beliefs. And so they need to be respected that way.
Inspiration And Cross Pollination of Ideas
A lot of bloggers pick a topic and get carried away with showing off their expertise in that area, rather than first defining a target audience.
Budding bloggers are also distracted with ‘showing off’ their expertise to their competitors.
Instead, the smart thing I learned after making this mistake myself, is that it’s better to write for a specific audience persona.
Once you do that, you’re no longer bound by any outdated topic. You’re not locked into rivalry and show off.
Rather you have the freedom to cross-pollinate concepts and combine ideas from a range of subject areas. And you can adapt them to solve problems of real concern to your target audience.
This way, there’s an evident freshness in your approach to things, compared with your competitors.
But usually…
Most bloggers are over preoccupied with their “expertise” than with their audience. And so many of them are distracted away from their readers and suffer from a disconnect.
Finally, because of this disconnect, the audience also slowly wanders off their blog.
However, when you have an individual persona in mind your content is much more inspired.
Besides, you’re not restricted to one subject line only.
Granular Experience Of Knowing Your Audience
Once you know who your audience is, you’ll benefit them and yourself in several ways.
1.You’ll understand the demographics of your audience, and know them as real individuals with actual concerns rather than abstract figures.
2.You largely understand their pain points and aspirations.
3.You also know a unique perspective to adopt, while creating your content
4.You also know exactly where to find your audience persona online.
5.On social media also know how to build your pins, share your posts, and even what headline you would craft.
6.Since your audience is not an abstract concept to you, you’re less likely to ramble on in your posts, in an attempt to impress everyone.
7. You’ll end up writing more meaningful posts, of value to the reader.
8. Your target reader is more likely to read and share your meaningful posts. And so as time passes, you will gradually find yourself gaining more blog followers.
All of these advantages are possible because you took the time to learn about your target reader.
How to Figure Out Who Your Target Reader Is
Identifying your target audience is easy once you’re clear on these two aspects
(1) For whom are you writing?
(2)What are the pain points that you’re solving?
Make a list of the following characteristics of your target reader to help you figure out who you are writing for:
1.Their gender and age
2.Where they hole up: city, state, urban, rural, international, etc.
3.Their line of work
4.How much money they earn.
5.Their marital status and whether or not they’re parents.
6.What they enjoy doing in their free time.
7.What social media platforms do they use.
8.How much time do they spend each day online? How frequently should you post your blogs for them?
9.On the internet, where they hang together.
10.Then what problem are you attempting to solve for them?
Having carved out a structure for identifying your audience persona, you need to locate them on the internet.
Where to Look for Your Target Audience
You’ll want to write about their specific concerns now that you’ve identified your target reader.
Here are some suggestions based on your niche:
Influential Bloggers
Head over to preferred and successful bloggers in your niche and take a look at their most recent blogs.
If you find those posts going viral that’s probably because audiences in your niche crave posts with the substance they’re consistently offering.
What do you do then?
Write content in the same vein from your own perspective and based on your own observations.
This is another reason for learning the ropes of viral blog posts.
Review Sites
Reviews have a direct impact on purchasing decisions: research shows that nearly 95% of shoppers read internet reviews before making a purchase.
Sites to check out are Amazon, Manta, Angie List, Yelp, etc. These review sites are the best sources for identifying the unique pain points of your online audience.
Facebook has massive leverage in audience identification. How?
Say you’re blogging about drones, and so you’ll find a plethora of drone communities on Facebook where people are actively seeking answers.
In fact, Facebook though losing interest among the younger demographic is extremely fertile ground for audience hunting. So if you just fiddle around those communities you’ll surely find your harvest of an audience there!
Google And Pinterest Suggestions
When you start typing in Google or Pinterest, they quickly suggest phrases that are relevant to your search.
Google even prompts you with FAQs about the search keyword.
Crafting posts around these questions and suggestions is a smart idea because it’s all about audience pain points and aspirations. Nice bait.
According to statistics released in The Next Web, every day, the average Reddit user spends 15 minutes and 47 seconds on Reddit, compared to a little over 11 minutes on Facebook.com and 6 minutes and 23 seconds on Twitter.com.
Reddit’s users organically rank information on the site in real-time, making it the front page of the internet.
Usually, Reddit subscribers operate through various “subReddits”, which help to bracket the users according to topic and niche.
Every Subreddit has its own set of community rules, and it’s crucial that you double-check that you’re not breaking any rules before posting.
So start sharing your own stuff when you’re ready, but go slow and steady. Avoid appearing spammy.
People will notice and you can be banned if you start publishing your blog content on multiple Subreddits right away.
Influencers And Hashtags On Instagram
Although Instagram lacks Facebook-style groups, hashtags are a powerful tool for finding your target audience and reaching out to them with your own posts.
For example, say you want to find a fitness-oriented audience for the planned launch of your fitness- blog.
To begin your search, you could use the hashtag #fitnessblogger. If you actually search Instagram for such results most likely you would discover something close to this:-
• Numerous trending pieces on the subject from prominent online influencers. And so you can consider building a relationship with them.
• You may also discover a goldmine of relevant keywords that you can exploit further.
• These additional related words can bring a sense of what others in the fitness niche are interested in.
Quora
Quora is a website where you can ask questions and find solutions to your problems from across the internet.
Once you’re clear about their popularity, you can use these questions to create blog articles.
Finally, from your blog, share some posts with a link, and voila, you have a backlink and more visitors to your post!
Lists On Twitter
Twitter lists are collections of Twitter accounts that have been selected. You can build your own lists as well as follow lists published by others.
There are a few simple ways to locate Lists that have previously been created in your niche.
But the best method is to find out an influencer in your niche and look at their existing Lists.
1.Do some research on Twitter along with Google Trends to discover which hashtags are popular in your niche.
2.Next, check for them on Twitter to see the kind of content being shared.
3.Examine the demographics of the audience that is using these hashtags. That may very well be your audience.
4.Keep an eye out for any prominent Twitterers who are deeply involved in these hashtags. Pay attention to what they’re saying, and mark them as prospective associates to contact as quickly as practical.
Where Else Can You Find Your Audience ?
Aside from what has been covered in the previous section, you can find your target audience on the internet in a number of other places.
1.You can find your target audience on Google.
2.Read the comments section on competitor blogs.
3.Learn from your own blog’s comments section.
4.Utilize well-known statistics (like Statistica.com)
5.In your niche, listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos.
6.Read books in your niche (and engage with their authors)
7.Find online communities (to find your target audience on)
8.Take a look at your rival sites (other influencers or brands in your niche)
Conclusion
Any business’s first and most important step toward success is defining its target audience. This is very important for a blogger, because as a content creator you need someone you can relate to.
And that someone is your “audience persona”.
By identifying and centering your content around your readers, you’ll also end up generating more meaningful and valuable posts for them, simply because you know them so well.
And the best way to know your audience is to know who you’re writing for, and what their problems are.
Eventually, finding your target audience on the internet is not difficult really. In fact, if you pay attention to everything been has discussed in this post, you may find things a lot easier.
Hope you find your ideal audience persona fast.