Identifying Your Target Audience

Brands need to understand three things to find their target audience:

• Their avatars, or ideal consumer profiles (AKA ICPs)
• Audience Intelligence, or audience behavior within their market
• Who to exclude within their target market

Let’s break each of these down.

What is an Avatar?

Marketers and brand managers call the ideal consumer of their brand an “avatar.” Interestingly, avatars are not real people. They are the prototypical consumer: the concept or idea of who will buy into what a brand is selling.

Avatars are perfect in every way. Real-world consumers within your market are going to vary slightly. As a result, your current clients likely do not match your avatar perfectly, but will still hit the major points you need for strong product-market fit.

This makes sense. When we think of a target audience, we’re considering a crowd of people. Individuals in a crowd, much like consumers in a market, do not look or act the exact same even though they have overlapping interests or needs. This makes it even more important to pursue those rare prospects who fit your ideal customer profile perfectly.

When creating an avatar for your brand, characteristics to consider include, but are not limited to:

Any of these traits identify consumers who may gain a greater value from a particular brand’s products or services.

What is Audience Intelligence?

Audience intelligence reveals how your target audience will behave within the market. This information can go deep in the 21st century thanks to social media, streaming apps, customer loyalty programs, and even GPS tracking data.

Audience intelligence can be gained through several channels including, but not limited to:

We’re at a point in society where companies are able to identify their target audience members across different devices, connect with them through advertisements, and appear wherever they are during the day.

This is why we see CPG brand marketing when we stream a show while riding the train, after Googling where to buy their products at home the night before.

Going even deeper, it’s why we see ads for products used by family members and friends we spend a lot of time around. Audience intelligence tells brands who their consumers are, who they spend time with, what they do, and how they do it. It’s a full-scale understanding of what makes up the ethos of a consumer.

Who Do You Exclude From Your Target Audience?

Arguably, the most important part of identifying your target audience is deciding who to leave out. It’s competitive nature to claim your product or service is for everyone; however, it’s more logical and success-oriented to realize that it truly is not.

Your avatar has already done most of the heavy lifting by identifying who you want in your target audience. Now you need to decide who won’t see the same benefits from your service or brand as your avatar would.

It’s important to remember to “niche down” when identifying your target market segment. Consider, for example, you are a bank looking to launch a new credit card. Chances are, the credit card will favor one segment over the others and the card is a strategic play to capture more brand awareness and clientele within that segment instead of others. Which of the following do you want or want to avoid?

• Experienced consumers who likely have higher credit scores, bigger salaries, and more purchasing power who are more likely to make fewer but larger purchases?
• College students and recent graduates who are new to the workforce and will make more frequent but smaller purchases?
• Urban foodies attracted to food and entertainment credit card points?
• Suburban commuters attracted to gas and transit credit card points?
• Cultural groups who expect to spend more toward the end of the year for the holidays?
• Corporate entities who will make large, consistent purchases throughout the year?

Who you target will make a lasting impact on your brand. If your credit card is a tool to break into the travel influencer market, chances are you are looking at 20-40 year old professionals who make six-figures a year, likely eat out a lot, live near international airports, and pay for premium social media subscriptions. This segment will boost your target clientele as a bank much more than retired grandparents living outside of town who regularly shop at the local grocer, and would rather spend their time with their young grandchildren.

Putting All Three Together

You forged your avatars, isolated out the poor fits for your product or service, and researched what your target audience members are interested in. It’s time to put everything together and brand yourself in a way that attracts your target audience. It’s time to help the market build trust in your services.

Part of engaging with your target audience is figuring out where they exist. These consumers can be found everywhere online, but it’s your job to filter out the channels they use less frequently. Travelers tend to use Instagram more than LinkedIn. Younger audiences tend to search through AI than traditional search engines.

Position Yourself for Your Target Audience

Now that you understand your target audience, what they like, and where they are, you need to use what you know about them to position yourself as the go-to solution for the problem you aim to solve.

Most businesses skip straight ahead to hiring a social media management agency, SEO consultant, or video production company, but they have not taken the time to blend all their audience intelligence into their brand. This causes any work done by the aforementioned agencies to fall short of optimal performance.

Our team brings enterprise audience and market intelligence solutions to small professional services and lifestyle brand businesses. We help local firms and brands understand who their target audience is and how to leverage that market segment. Reach out today to learn more about our audience identification solutions.