How To Find & Attract The Right Audience [Part 1]

One of the most basic rules of marketing is to know your audience, yet many businesses still struggle to keep existing customers, much less, gain new ones. Today, businesses are putting too much focus on growing lists, fans, and followers instead of building an engaging community. Many attempt to create engaging marketing strategies to build their audience, but end up with a very little return on their investment. This is because crafting the right messages for engagement is a whole new task to tackle once you have identified your target audience.

Identify your target audience
As an online business, knowing your target audience is crucial. You are not going to be able to grow and build an audience if you don’t know the specific type of customers you want to attract. No one can afford to target everyone, but with a clearly defined target audience, it is much easier to determine where and how to market. Plus, it will make your marketing efforts more efficient and increase the potential for successful engagement.

Look at your existing customer base
You can learn a lot just from the data of your existing customers. Analyzing this data can help a business get to know who their customers are on a more personal level. It will also help gain insight into their existing customer’s activities and learn more about their online browsing activity. All of this information can help deliver better, more targeted campaigns and define what a qualified audience looks like.

Who is visiting your site?
One way to get know your existing customer base is by knowing who is currently visiting your site. Google Analytics can provide you with demographic data such as age and gender under the audience category. By analyzing this, a business can compare their current audience to their target.

Where are they located?
Geography is also important. Are your customers in the US or international? To target accordingly, a business will want to know where current site visitors are located. Google Analytics can provide you with this data under the audience category as well.
How are they getting to your site?

A business also needs to understand how their existing audience is getting to their site. You will want to examine which channels are bringing in the most traffic and the highest conversions. A business should focus on 6 main acquisition channels: direct, organic, referral, social, paid, and email. These are also the 6 main channels Google Analytics tracks.

Now that you’ve got a good idea of who your customer is, it’s time to focus on creating content that converts and engages.

This post is a part of a 2 part series. Check back next Friday, June 10th for part 2.