Whether you're a new business ready to launch or you've got an existing company and are wanting to grow, one of the key things that you'll need to do is to identify your target market. Of course you may have an idea of this already based on previous customers, research or insights, on the other hand you may not have a real idea of this.

Identifying the right audience for you can be useful in so many ways, it can help you increase your sales, customer base and profits while it can also save money from the likes of reducing ad spend that is targeted at the wrong audiences.

What is meant by target audience

If you're not familiar with this term or simply want a better understanding of it you'll like our easy to understand explanation or definition of it. We define a target audience as a specific set of people who you can expect to purchase from you whether that is a product or service. This will not solely be new people who haven't purchased from you as it includes your existing customers as well as potential customers.

By understanding who your target audience is, you can be more efficient in every part of your business, from customer service to marketing to product innovation and pretty much everything else in your business and hence it's a very important tool for your business to understand.

The tools to understand your audience

There are a lot of tools and platforms out there that can help you to look at your audience and get a better understanding of them as well as discover new target audiences who may be suitable for you to target. One of our favourites is Audiense, which look to create a strategy for your brand which put consumer segmentation and cultural understandings at the heart of your business. They help you to identify any relevant audiences as well as creating actionable insights to help you form a strategy to target these audiences. Ultimately they have the tools which can help your business grow.

There software can help you create unique audience segments, allow you to not only discover who your audience are but to get a deeper understanding so not only can you better target them with the likes of ads but also you can ensure your product/offering will meet their needs. Above you'll see an example of the types of insights you can get from their tools.

Of course what are insights if not used?

Many companies offer solutions to find insights into your business audience, however not as many look into and give you actionable tactics and strategies to help you grow. With Audiense you'll not only see the insights, they'll give you ideas of how to engage and activate your audience whether this is online or offline. Below you'll see a screenshot example of how this may look and how it can open up opportunities for your business and brand.

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You'll also find that Audiense also have Audiense Connect which is the number one Twitter marketing platform which helps you take Twitter and your strategy on it to the next level, helping you to grow not only your sales via this platform but also your brand awareness and overall impact on the platform. As is often the case a picture can paint a thousand words and below you'll see another example screenshot from the software.

Ways to find your target audience

There are other ways that you can find information about your target audience than software like we've mentioned above. Historically the most common method would be market research, from asking questionnaires to doing surveys, this type of research tool is great at finding out information however it can be quite costly to do in terms of time and money to acquire it.

Typically you'll be able to find information about your target audience including things like:

• Demographics i.e gender, age, job, salary, relationship status etc
• Location - i.e where they live or work from
• Values, personality, behaviours and more indepth information

Additional you'll also be able to find more general information such as trends within the market, the economic landscape, buying habits, information about your competition and so on.

What to do once you know your target audience

Once you've understood who your audience is, you may be thinking that's great but how can I actually benefit from this, below you'll find just a few of the benefits from knowing more about your target audience and market.

• Better target where they may be i.e show ads on relevant websites, in relevant areas
• Understand what pain points they may have and fix them before they are an issue
• Find the right platforms they use such as social media so you can ensure your presence is there
• Create content that they will love and share

Of course the list goes on and we'd love to go into more depth but that there is much more detailed research out there and companies that specialise in it who can offer you more knowledge than we can.

If you like the sound of a tool to make this easier don't forget to check out our Audiense discount code giving you 10% off for 12 months.