Any business that is successful has determined who their target audience is, and have learned how to appropriately communicate with them. Knowing who they are and how to reach them is an essential part for any business. When creating my business, Top Knotted, I determined my audience right away, and found it so much easier to establish my marketing approach. We will use it as an example through this blog.
What is a Target Audience?
By definition a target audience is “a group of people defined by certain demographics and behaviour.” (Sprout Social, 2020) These demographics and psychographics could be;
- Age
- Gender
- Education Level
- Ethnic or religious backgrounds
- Lifestyle
- Lower/Middle/Upper class
- Hobbies, etc
Determining your target audience will help you establish a targeted marketing strategy that will effectively allow you to communicate with your audience. If you need more help finding your audience, check out Sprout Social’s page on Target Audiences.
Top Knotted’s target audience is women ages 16 to 30. From this age group they are split up into those with families, i.e moms, and then on the other hand, students. My audience typically is middle class – they have the extra spare income to spend on hair accessories for themselves or their children.
How To Communicate Effectively
Once you know your audience, determine where they are on the internet. My Audience is typically on large social media platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat. But an older audience, for example, might be found on Facebook or Twitter.
Knowing where they are on socials is important, but your content needs to be specific to what your audience will want to respond to. I find that my audience likes to see pages that look uniform, their content has the same style and look to them. So I have adapted this into my instagram content. See how my content looks uniform? This is easy to incorporate and maintain, by quickly editing each picture to look the same.
Interacting with your audience is important on social media. Do you want to be a part of the conversation? You might need to start it! Choose issues, trends and relevant topics and start engaging your audience. On Instagram I create polls on my stories and get product insight. I also ask questions in my posts and get a conversation going that way too!
Ready to stand apart? Spend some time researching your audience – really get to know them! You could even go right to the source, start a poll on your socials/website and get the answers right from them. From there, create a plan to market your services and products specifically for them!
What do you do to communicate with specific audiences?
–Becca
References
Sprout Social. (2020). Target Audience. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/glossary/target-audience/
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 