Would you rather shoot a quiver of arrows blindly, hoping to hit your target, or shoot one and hit the bullseye on the first try?
Much like archery, marketing requires you to see your target. In this case, your target audience. Setting sights on your target audience can help you hone your digital marketing campaigns, increase conversion rates, and build trust within your neighborhood—all equally essential aspects of local small business strategy.
Follow this simple and actionable guide to reach your target audience, complete with real-world business insights from Nextdoor.
What is a target audience?
A target audience represents a specific group of people who can uniquely benefit from your local business’s products or services—the people you want to connect with. They heavily inform your marketing communication strategy, influencing your:
- Copy
- Promotions
- Social media content
- Ad campaigns
- Product development
Target audiences are subsets of your overarching target market; they offer more specific insight into your market and create opportunities to personalize your marketing message.
Learn more about defining your
Benefits of knowing your target audience
Running a local small business is all about being neighborly. First, you’ll need to learn who your customers are and build genuine connections with them.
When you know how to reach your target audience, you can:
- Increase customer engagement and loyalty
- Improve marketing strategies
- Enhance product development and services
- Boost conversion rates and sales
How do you discover and cultivate these essential relationships? Follow the steps below.
1. Identify your target audience
How do you find and choose a specific target audience? Start big by identifying your target market.
Target markets represent broader market categories for your business. For example, if you run a cafe, your target market will likely feature coffee lovers. Or if you sell real estate, it’ll be local homebuyers.
Target markets offer great starting points for identifying your target audiences. Once you have a general idea of your market, you can hone in using target audience research methods such as:
- Demographic analysis – Demographics encompass important audience information, including age, gender, income, and more. These factors can influence audience engagement habits; understanding them helps you craft compelling marketing campaigns your audience will respond to. Use surveys, social media insights, and other digital analytic tools to research audience demographics. Analyzing demographic information helps tailor your content, ensuring it resonates with your intended audience and drives engagement.
- Psychographic profiling – This encompasses more subjective information about your target audience, including interests, habits, and values. You can create comprehensive psychographic profiles by conducting customer surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
- Buyer personas – Customer or buyer personas offer a more creative approach to target audience identification and analysis. Using demographic and psychographic data, imagine hypothetical customers that represent your target audiences, complete with names, occupations, and preferences. Here’s an example of a real estate customer persona: Brian, a 30-year-old accountant, wants to buy his first home, big enough to accommodate his growing family.
2. Analyze your target audience
After you identify your target audiences, you can begin analyzing them. A target audience analysis gives you greater insight into your specific audience members’ demographics, purchasing behaviors, values, and more. Interpret your data using:
- Google Analytics – This tool offers valuable insight into your website’s audience traffic. You can define multiple audiences and track their behavior to make your marketing efforts more accurate and personalized. Discover more tips on how to conduct an effective
- Social media analytic tools – You can also analyze how your different audiences engage with your social media pages. See who else they follow and how they interact with content on each specific platform to understand their online habits.
If identifying your target audience tells you who to reach, analysis shows you how to reach them. Once you know that, you can tailor your marketing efforts to boost engagement and increase conversions.
3. Adapt your marketing strategies
Use your new target audience insights to enhance your next marketing campaign. Try these effective strategies:
- Personalize your content and messaging – Most neighbors want to know how a service can best benefit them—and that means personalizing your marketing efforts to their interests and needs. For example, if your target audience is college students, consider offering student discounts or promoting your business on college campuses. Discover more about personalization and how interest targeting plays a role.
- Choose the appropriate marketing channels – Your messaging won’t reach your target audience if they can’t see it. Think: which social media platforms do they use? Are they on Nextdoor, as one in three U.S. households are? Consider focusing your marketing efforts on your target audience’s most popular platforms, rather than spreading your content thin over each one.
- Measure and adjust your strategies – Marketing campaigns require constant tweaking, even after identifying and analyzing your target audience. With these tips and tools, you can continue to make your marketing message more personal and compelling for your target audiences.
MassWIC, a free Massachusetts nutrition program, realized it could best reach its target audience—Massachusetts families in need—by running a marketing campaign on Nextdoor. Because Nextdoor verifies neighbors’ residency, the platform ensures that MassWIC engages with people who qualify for its services.
That’s how you adapt to your target audience: meet them where they are.
Form lasting neighborhood connections with Nextdoor
Feel like you’re missing the target with your current marketing strategies? Nextdoor can help you hit your mark.
With a Nextdoor Business Page, you can create a positive local presence quickly and organically. Nextdoor Ads Manager helps you further engage with your neighbors using personalized copy and advanced targeting options. Interact 1:1 with specific target audience members and promote the products and services you know they’ll benefit from.
Ensure your local business reaches the neighbors who need you most. Build your free Business Page and launch your first ad campaign to start growing today.
Sources:
- Hubspot. How to Use Psychographics in Your Marketing: A Beginner's Guide. https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/marketing-psychographics
- Google Analytics Help. [UA] The Audiences report. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7162572?hl=en#zippy=%2Cin-this-article
