6 Steps To Reach Your Target Audience & Boost Sales

Reaching the right audience is crucial, especially nowadays where  we’re bombarded with ads everywhere we look.

If you want to be successful, you must stand out from the crowd, you can achieve that by studying about your target audience. What social media sites they use, what are the topics they’re interested in, what time they are active online etc. 

You must know everything about them if you want to market to them successfully.

It’ll help you tailor content to them and drive revenues. 

We’ll look at 5 easy steps to define and reach your target audience.

What Is A Target Audience?

Your target audience is the people that need your products, can afford it but don’t know about you yet.

These are the people you should focus your marketing efforts around. Don’t make the same mistake most marketers make – reaching to everyone.

It’s ineffective and only decreases your profits.

On the other hand, focus instead on the specific audience who are really really interested in your business. Knowing who exactly to target and creating a personalized marketing experience can go a long way…

Yet many businesses don’t know who their target audience is…

It’s usually because they lack the necessary data or don’t know how to do market research properly. This costs them lots of money, time AND decreases the effectiveness of their strategy.

How To Define Target Audience?

You must gather data before you can create an ideal customer profile.

There are two approaches you can take.

No matter which one you choose, you’ll need to find answers to the 10 questions below to define your ideal customer. 

1. Where do they hang out?
2. Where do they get their information?
3. What are their challenges & frustrations?
4. What are their goals & priorities right now?
5. What brands do they like?
6. What is their preferred form of communication?
7. What phrases and exact language do they use?
8. What is their budget?
9. What does a day in their life look like?
10. What makes them happy?

Using Existing Customer’s Data

It’s very accurate because you’re using real-time data of the audience that has already bought from you.

You can easily get that data from Google Analytics. 

Go to Audience > Demographics > Overview to see the in-depth data about your audience.

You’ll get a report that looks like the one below.

Look at the data, think about who these buyers are, how they think and answer the 10 questions above.

Creating A Buyer Persona Without Existing Data

This approach isn’t as accurate and you’ll need to put in more effort, but doesn’t mean it’s not doable. 

There are three places where you can look for data.

Social media

The best social media for researching is Facebook –  the social media with the most active users.

Join social media groups where your potential customer hangs out.

Create posts like the one you see below and learn more about what your target audience desires.

You’ll get the data that will help you learn more about them. You should also look at the existing posts for more information.

Forums

Let’s look at the most popular forum on the internet – Quora.

You can either create a question and wait for the answers or browse through existing questions and look at the answers provided.

This is a great chance for you to hear from your potential clients directly and understand their concern, expectations, and experience. 

Get inspired by competitors

The last thing is to check out your competitors.

Look for successful companies in your niche, and look at their writing style, language and tone.

You can take a look at the example below and see exactly who this blog is targeting. They target small businesses with the goal of getting and retaining customers.

It’s a great way to look for successful examples of how you can plan your marketing efforts and better define your target audience.

Create Ideal Customer Profile

You can easily create an ideal customer profile with HubSpot’s Persona Generator.

It’s easier to use than the usual, old-fashioned approach you can see below.

Just go to HubSpot Persona Generator and click on Build My Persona.

You’ll get redirected to the persona creation page. There are 7 steps you’ll need to take to define your target audience.

Finish all the steps to find out what’s your target audience. These are the people that will bring you most profits.

You should start tailoring your marketing strategy to them. 

When you know who is your target audience, it’s time to start tailoring your market plan around them.

5 Steps To Reach Your Target Audience 

You have defined your target audience.

The only thing that’s left is to get in front of them and let them know about your business.

We’ll look at how to do that in 5 easy steps to help you reach the right audience, convert them and drive sales. Let’s get started.

Use Targeted Advertising

A search engine is where everything starts.

Whether it’s buying or learning more about the specific topic. If you want to know about something, you type it in Google. 

And the higher you rank, the more traffic you get.

However, if your website is new, or your brand is new,  it can be difficult to rank high. 

You’re competing with giant companies that have been here for ages. That’s why it’s better to use ads, that will place you directly on top of the SERP.

PPC ads show up above the search results, which can be fantastic to put your brand front and center for any searchers to see.  However, there’s a catch… You are paying for every single click a searcher. That’s why it’s called Pay Per Click advertising. 

This can be scary for most marketers. 

They think that they don’t have enough resources for that. But as it turns out, you actually end up getting more than you spend!

There are two reasons why PPC ads work so well. 

1. Targeted audience

You can choose the specific audience you want to target.

You can choose their age, gender, household income and pick phrases they need to type in to see your ad.

It allows you to make your ads ultra-specific and target only searchers that are ready to buy.

1. Visibility

PPC ads rank above the organic search results. 

They’ll be the first thing your customers see. They can also include extensions, which can help them stand out from organic results.

PPC ads aren’t the only type of targeted advertising.

There are other types such as social media ads you can use to reach your target audience across different platforms.

Find The Right Marketing Channel

There’s a lot of clutter these days.

If you want to stand out, you must perfect your targeting strategy.

However, you can’t accomplish that by focusing on all channels. It’s a much better option to pick one and perfect it.

You can see the most popular marketing channels below.

It’s common sense to start focusing on the top channels, right?

However, there are two problems with using them…

1. Each of your competitors looks at this same chart and will be focusing on the same top channels
2. It’s a general chart and your audience may differ from it

If you’re looking to stand out and find the right channel for the specific audience, there’s a much better option – SparkToro.

SparkToro

It’s a basic tool that will connect your business to market by helping you see where your audience hangs out. You’ll see what pages they like, what influencers they follow, etc. 

Go to SparkToro and choose “My Audience Uses These Words In Their Profile”. Continue by writing your target audience’s job position to the search bar.

Hit Search and you’ll get detailed statistics about them.

You can choose the category of the places where they hang out in the left side menu.

You can for example see their favourite influencer or which social media they use. You can use this information to reach them by their preferred way.

It’s an easy way to find what your audience likes, where they hang out and how to reach them.

Getting more info about your ideal customers has never been easier.

Create Content For Your Audience

Content marketing is crucial for building a successful online presence.

It’ll help you get more traffic, establish yourself as an authority and build a rapport with your customers.

It’ll also help you to rank higher, which will position you right in front of your target audience.

That’s why it’s so effective in lead generation.

However, there’s a lot of content on the Internet.

If you want to get traffic, you must produce high-quality content. 

You must find a way to stand out and appeal to your target audience to get their attention.

You can do that in 2 easy steps below.

1. Perform keyword research

If you want to be in front of your audience, you must rank high. 

You can do that by targeting the keywords people type into the search engine – keyword research.

How do you know what keywords your targeted audience uses? You can use BiQ Cloud for that.

Go to BiQ Cloud Keyword Intelligence and type in he topic you want to write about.

Hit enter to get all keywords your target audience searches for.

Include them in your content to be more relevant, thus rank higher and get more traffic.

1. Make your content relevant

If you’re looking to retain your target audience, you must produce relevant content that answers its questions.

It’ll help you with ranking higher and more traffic too.

Click on Popular Questions in the upper menu to get a list of questions your target audience asks.

Include answers in your content, deliver the information your readers desire and be more relevant.

1. Balance Frequency & Reach

The two variables you’ll operate with are frequency & reach.

Frequency is how many times your customers saw the advertisement or your message.

You should show your target audience your message at least 7 times for the maximal effectiveness.

This is called The Rule of 7.

The second variable is reach.

Reach is how many potential customers you’ve reached. The more customers you reach, the higher chances of conversions.

It’s important to work with both of these variables wisely.

You should adjust them to your budget and find a natural balance.

If you show your ad to your target audience only once, most of them won’t convert – only 2% do. 

Showing your ads more than once is called retargeting.

The same applies to reach. 

If you show your ad to almost nobody, you have very low chances of converting. The chart below will help you understand the correlation between frequency and reach.

As you can see, showing your message to the audience too frequently can do the opposite – hurt your business. It’ll only make you look annoying and decrease the conversion rate. 

Strive to find the natural balance between the reach and frequency.

1. Revisit Your Audience Research

We live in a fast-paced era.

Your target audience might’ve liked one thing a week ago, but now there’s a new trend they’re obsessed with.

You should revisit and conduct target audience research regularly. 

You must be prepared for sudden changes and adjust accordingly.

Remember, creating an ideal customer profile isn’t a one-time thing. Rather, it’s something you should do regularly to stay ahead.

Revisit your ideal customer profile at least once a month.

1. BONUS STEP: Perfect User Experience

You’ve followed the 5 steps above and targeted the right audience.

You should see a big traffic boost by now. In fact, Bloghands.com saw a 403% traffic boost when it started reaching the right audience.

But to sustain this traffic, you must perfect user experience. Because if you don’t, your potential customers will leave you for competitors…

You’ll see no conversions, no retention and high bounce rate. 

This signals Google that your website isn’t well optimized and may hurt your rankings. 

You can see how poor user experience affects rankings below – the longer your site loads, the lower you rank.

So, how do you perfect user experience?

Mobile Friendliness

Majority of searches come from mobile. 

If you want to retain mobile visitors, you must make your website mobile-friendly.

In fact, that’s what people expect nowadays… If you fail to do that, they’ll leave and never return again.

Fortunately, this creates a big opportunity, because most sites aren’t optimized for smartphones…

Learn more about mobile optimization and strategies you can use.

Website Speed

Time is money, right?

This is especially true with page speed where every second count.

The higher the page speed, the more people will leave your site. 

That’s how we operate, we simply don’t like looking at the loading screen and waiting…

However, most websites fail to optimize page speed – Only 15% of websites operate at an acceptable page speed.

Be different and learn how to optimize your website speed right now.

Call-To-Action

Including a call-to-action on your website can make a huge difference. Just look what difference made including a CTA in emails…

It increased sales by 1617%.

Your sales would go through the roof. However, most marketers don’t use this tactic and lose a lot of money…

Make sure you aren’t one of them.

You should also personalize it, which will help increase the CTR and drive more sales.

Have I Missed Something?

We’ve talked about 5 steps for reaching the target audience.

You’ve learnt how to create a target audience profile and that user experience is key for driving sales.

Now, I’d like to hear from you…

Did you like the 5 steps we’ve talked about today?

Let us know about your ideas for getting in front of the target audience and increasing sales.

Leave a comment below now.