How to create a target audience

You have a business, sell products, offer a service. And very often you would say that your services can be good for ANY client.

When someone asks you which group of people is in your target audience, you don't know what exactly to say, and you may not know what precisely the target audience means. No worries. Today we will explain what is behind the phrase target audience and why it is necessary to define it if you want to advertise on the Internet.

For starters - the target audience is not the same as the actual audience.

The real audience is all the people who visit your website, watch your ads, follow you on the networks, contact you and ask for your services. It is (hopefully) a large number of people with even more interests, habits, and needs. However, all those who follow your activity and work on the Internet are attracted to some of the same things that you offer and represent. These people are looking for the same thing. They have some common traits and patterns of behavior that you need to discover.

But why? Because when you discover what brings the same people to your place, you can define your ideal customer, the audience you are targeting.

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The target audience is the group of people you want to attract with your product, quality, skill, and ultimately advertising. It is your ideal client, ideal customer.

Group or Persona

At the very beginning, it is better to imagine the target audience as a prototype person who would get everything she needs from you. In this way, you will integrate all the relevant features and information gathered from a lot of people into one abstract customer who represents them all. This will help you to create a story about your brand that would attract the attention of such a customer. It requires a lot of research, but it all goes for good cooperation and business. At the end (and the beginning), your target audience must be satisfied.

Well, let’s see what the search for the ideal client looks like.

1. What is the basis of your whole business is your core idea. Who are you? Authentic you? Before looking for people who would like your work, you need to know clearly who you or your company are and how you want to present yourself to people. What is unique about you, your best side that you want to advertise on the Internet. You build your brand around that, and you gather your audience around the brand.
   
   Tip: In the beginning, it is good to focus on a narrower specialty in something. Even if you can offer a wide range of services, focus first on one thing, one skill. That will narrow down the number of features your audience may have, making it easier to define. Otherwise, a too general kind of service attracts different people who are difficult to group by any parameter.
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2. Once you determine who you are, you need to explore who your audience might be.
   Which means you need to dive into a bunch of information on the Internet. To avoid getting lost in info, search for concrete places where you can find anything related to your business. True treasures here are - social networks and platforms.
   
   Why are social networks a great source for research?
   There, people write their opinions on absolutely all possible topics. If you are selling some gadgets, search for posts and blogs that people write about such things. There you will find their impressions, wishes, experiences, and opinions. And most importantly you will see who the people who write those posts are. It is deep research, but it gives results from which you can see what exactly your audience is looking for. In the next step, you should make a compromise between your original idea and the needs of the audience to achieve perfect cooperation for mutual benefit.
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3. When your wishes and the wishes of your clients come together.
   The next step is to use parameters to determine who the audience you want to compromise and collaborate with is. The parameters are as follows:
   
   Status. One can also say profession, life circumstance, and hobbies. What the people of your target audience do is truly important. Do you want to attract professional people, big companies, or startup innovative geniuses? Think about it well. See to whom your product and service would be beneficial. Status does not have to refer only to the profession but to any segment of life. It is not the same to offer something to parents, students, business people, etc.  The bottom line is - different groups of people have different interests.
   
   Interests. Let's mention it one more time - through social networks, you can easily find out who is interested in your thing and for what reason. Absorb this kind of information from people who are your potential audience. Once you find out what their interests are, you can devise a way to bring your brand closer to them. For example, if you are marketing a product, you need to know who is generally more interested in a product like yours.
   
   Goals. Once you have roughly determined the status of a person, you can also roughly determine what the goal of their interests is. That way you will know what your service offers to the audience. Is it meaningful for them in business terms, or is it a daily business or a hobby?
   
   Age. It seems like an insignificant thing, but it actually plays a great role. People at certain ages are interested in certain things. So, you probably won't offer anti-age cosmetics to young girls. You will also probably sell gaming equipment to people aged 16-30, more or less. The bottom line is that years choose interests even though boundaries are not sharply drawn.
   
   Gender. Another parameter that deserves more attention. No, you don't want to exclude only men or only women from your target audience, but the fact is that one gender dominates in visiting some websites.
   You can check this information with companies that operate and advertise longer. Or you can simply ask yourself - who visits makeup websites more?
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Still not sure why you need to observe these parameters and know all this information from people? Simply because based on that you create content on your website. And in other forms of advertising. You then introduce yourself to a group of people formed based on parameters, and you do it in a way that will attract that specific group.

Let's say you're a gamer. If you take a look at these parameters, you can roughly say that your target audience would be adolescents, probably students or young adults. With some types of games, you could even say that the majority of the audience is male.

Here, the target audience is already slowly forming. To draw such conclusions, of course, much deeper consideration and research are needed. And that's not all.

It is not enough to just target a certain group of people. You have to present yourself adequately to your audience. That includes always keeping in mind the characteristics and patterns of behavior of the target audience. Based on that, you will introduce yourself to them through well-designed content.

• The content. Text, images, videos, gifs, and more. Content on the websites can be in any form. But on website, the content should be in the form that will most benefit the audience.
  Let's explain this with an example. We could say that adolescents follow videos, interesting gifs, and short interactive content more. You can lose the attention of young people easily with long texts and extensive explanations. Especially if they are there to have fun.
  
  On the other hand, if you were to offer a service to a serious company, then the content would probably be formatted as longer or shorter text. You will have relevant information about you and your business presented clearly. Again, it all depends on WHO you are targeting. Therefore, try to choose a good medium to convey your message to others. Only then it will lead to successful cooperation or purchase.
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• Platform. It is equally important where you are on the Internet. People visit different places, but certain groups are again interested in different platforms. You need to be where your target audience spends the most time.
  You probably won't find teenagers on LinkedIn, but you will find them on Instagram, etc. You probably won't find older people on TikTok. 
  Youtube, for example, has very diverse Users, so you should wisely use these gathering places where people exchange knowledge and opinions.
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In short, don't try to feed a cat grass because it's pointless. You will lose too much energy and money if you offer everything to various profiles of people because there will always be someone dissatisfied. On the other hand, you will lose people who would really be interested in you if they become your target audience.

And, of course, it doesn’t mean that when you create a target audience you exclude some people. On the contrary, everyone is welcome. However, you have that group of people with whom you know exactly what you are targeting. You know what that group expects from you and what you can expect from them. 

Because after all, that is how trust is built. And trust is the basis of every good business.

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