Reach Your Target Audience Online

Everyone is not your potential customer.

As an online marketer, I have daily conversations with business owners about growing their businesses.  Understanding your target audience, or best prospective customers, is an ideal way to achieve your business goals.  What do you already know about your customers? Think about the following:

• Which consumers are most profitable for your business? If you have several, outline each persona and their traits.
• What common interests do they share? What are some problems they need to solve?
• Which social networks are they using?

Here are 3 tips to help you get started on designing the plan to reach your target audience with a solid online marketing strategy.

1)       Understand your market potential.

Researching your market potential will help guide your online marketing strategy. Is your business product or service already being purchased by consumers? How much money is spent in your industry and in your area? What is the frequency of spending? Are their numerous providers of your products and services (competition) in your market place? What is the need for your product or service?

A free resource to find data and information is the library.  Many libraries offer online access to a wealth of business data for library card holders. Once you determine the potential market for your business, you can start working on your strategy to reach those consumers.

2)       Find out how your target audience spends time online.

Do you know what words people search for online to find products and services like yours? What social networks are your customers using? Are you collecting your customer’s email addresses? (everyone should be nodding their heads) What content is your customer reading online?

Ask your current customers about their social network usage. Send a survey out via email to your customers and find out what they are reading online and what things they would like to see from your business. Hint: offer a small prize or coupon for completing the survey.

3)      Research target audience potential on the social networks.  

A great way to find out if your target audience is using a social channel is to utilize ad platform tools for research. Google AdWords allows you to utilize a keyword planner to find out the estimated number of searches in your market place. Facebook Ad Manager can select target audience by geography, age/gender, interests, family status and more and provides you with the number of profiles that match your criteria.  Twitter ads allow you to pull information about geographic location of users, user interests in other twitter accounts and people just like those that are following your business already.

Once you determine your potential and understand your target audience’s behavior online, create your online marketing strategy, focus your efforts on the social media networks that make sense for your business based on audience participation. Create a content plan that speaks to your audience personas, determine the frequency you will incorporate into your content marketing and consider creating an advertising budget to reach your target audience on the social networks and in search engines.

By focusing your time and efforts on your best business prospects online and the social networks, you will eliminate wasted dollars, gain new connections that can potentially be converted into new customers and stand apart from your competitors.

AdMix Social, is a full service digital marketing agency that helps businesses achieve their goals by developing online marketing strategies. Contact us for more information.