How To Find and Build a Relationship With Your Target Audience

Ed Pronley

December 22, 2021 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Finding and understanding your target audience is a major part of running a successful content marketing campaign. Not only can it make your marketing strategies more effective, but it can also provide you with information to help your business succeed. If you’re hoping to start or improve your marketing campaigns, it’s important to examine your target audience and see how you can better interact with them. In this article, we discuss what your target audience is, along with how you can find members and build a long-lasting relationship with them.

What Is a Target Audience?

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A target audience is the group of people who are most likely to make a purchase from a company or business. Businesses use what they know about their target audience to create more effective products and marketing materials to attract more customers to their brand. Having the ability to target a specific audience can also help businesses save money by marketing to a few potential customers at a time instead of every customer possible. Some factors that help determine a brand’s target audience, include:

Age
Gender
Location
Education
Socioeconomic status
Interests and hobbies
Purchasing behaviors

Why Is It Important to Build an Audience Relationship?

Building a relationship with your audience is important for several reasons, including:

Understanding their needs: This factor can help you create products and services with which the audience has more interest. It can also help you focus your marketing materials on how your brand can address those needs to entice more readers to make a purchase.
Seeing their reactions: When you have a relationship with your audience, they’re more likely to answer your surveys and tell you about their reactions to your brand’s decisions. This can help you see which of your marketing strategies and products are successful, and which ones need some help or additional development.
Developing loyalty: If your audience develops loyalty to your brand, they’re more likely to see you as an authority in your industry and purchase more products from you. They’re also more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family, increasing your customer outreach.
Increasing marketing success: When you create relationships with your audience, your marketing can have more success because you know the best ways to communicate with them and show them new marketing materials. It’s also possible they’ll be on the lookout for new product releases and company news, reducing the effort and costs of your marketing campaigns.

Tips for Finding Your Target Audience

Here is a list of steps to help you find your target audience:

Conduct Market Research

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Market research can help identify general statistics and information about your audience quickly. Using tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Insights, you can have a better understanding of your audience’s age, gender, and location. This information can help you develop an idea of your target audience’s generation, which can help you spot purchasing behaviors. For example, if your target audience is between 28 to 40 years old, it’s important to know that 91% of millennials prefer shopping online versus shopping in person.

Use Social Media

Using social media and reading audience comments is a great way to understand your audience’s interests, hobbies, and education level. When you see someone like or comment on your posts, you can follow their profile to see what other brands they interact with or like. You can also look at their profiles, which might list some of their primary interests and pastimes. As you research your followers, you can find commonalities between them and figure out more effective ways to market towards them.

Create Customer Personas

Customer personas are fictional customers examples businesses create to better understand who might find interest in their products and services. Businesses develop personas from specific information, like age, gender, location, and interests, to see how each category affects a customer’s actions and buying decisions. Companies can then use this information and apply it to their sales maps, which help them see the steps a customer might take when making a purchase.

Related: What Is a Persona?

How To Build a Relationship with Your Target Audience

Here is a list of steps to help you build a relationship with your target audience:

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1. Create an Email List

Email lists let you send marketing materials directly to your audience’s inbox. This can help your marketing messages feel more human, which establishes stronger relationships. Using some email marketing tools, you can also make each of your newsletters or email messages more personal to who’s receiving them. Most people who sign up for email lists have some interest in your brand before giving you their contact information. That means they might be more ready and willing to read what you send them and develop a better relationship.

2. Listen to Feedback

Feedback is a great way for you to understand what your audience likes or dislikes about your marketing and brand. When you listen to their feedback, it shows your audience that you care about their voices and feelings. This can help improve your audience relationship and allow them to develop a stronger trust in your business.

3. Respond on Social Media

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Examining social media comments and likes can help you learn about your audience, but it’s important to respond to them as well. When you reply to comments or messages on your social media profile, it can show people that your brand is active and helpful. When people publically ask questions about your products or services, respond to them, so others can see the answer, too. If people write a complaint about your product or business, reply to that too, so people know you’re working to correct any problems or challenges.

Social media is also a great way for you to see if multiple people have the same questions or complaints. For example, if many people ask about shipping times, consider highlighting that information somewhere on your website. If many people have an issue with how you package your products, consider making those adjustments to show you listen to their feedback.

4. Develop Informative Content

Creating content to help promote your brand can attract audiences to your site, while simultaneously building a relationship with them. That’s because content can give your audience a wide variety of information. From trending blogs and product release statements to informative research articles and white papers, written content gives your audience consistent, helpful guidance and advice. If you provide your audience with enough helpful information, they can develop trust and loyalty in your brand and look to it and your content for more information in the future.

Want some help to execute the perfect content marketing plan? Companies like CopyPress have the tools and team of experts ready to help you find your target audience and build a lasting relationship with them. Whether you’re looking to start a brand new campaign, or you’re hoping to revitalize an existing one, we have the resources to help. Schedule a free call with us today!