Powerful Tools to Find Your Target Audience
Do you want to know who your target audience is?
In this era of the digital revolution, the relationship between brands and consumers has been optimized to maximize profits. To begin with, before creating any content or strategy, identifying your target audience is crucial. For example, if you are writing a blog, you will need to identify your readers and the tone that appeals to them. Similarly, it is essential to identify the audiences’ preferences that map with the brand’s products.
Knowing your audience is critical, as their profiles are diverse due to various factors like geographical locations, linguistic diversity, social factors, anthropometric diversity, and technological accessibility challenges.
The open audience is the total amount of audience out there for you to conduct the study, convert them into your target audience, and finally into potential customers. The open audience can be approached both online as well as offline to drive them towards your brand.
The process of getting your target audience involves segmenting the open audience and filtering them through various tools.
To analyze your target audience, let’s look at five powerful tools that offer a complete insight into audience personas and profiles. The image above will also give you an idea of filtration at various steps of the tools that we are going to see next.
1. Google Trends
Google is ranked number one amongst search engines as it has more than 200 million active users asking their queries per hour around the globe. The major chunk of searches i.e 114% is performed by the users on Google. Google Trends is a tool offered by Google that analyzes the top trending search queries by various users across various regions and languages and presents it in a form of a graph and charts that compare the search volume of different queries over time across various demographics.
Using this tool at the beginning of your research helps you to maximize exposure and understand your audiences’ engagement. Google Trends is free and the search data can be easily exported for further research.
The data obtained from Google Trends comes from live searches performed by the users, hence the data is constantly updated and latest in nature. Google Trends only gives relative numbers and there is no way to get absolute numbers. Therefore, a comparison search needs to be done to get results that can be compared.
It is not possible to track people who are off the internet through Google Trends. Hence, the context of the search is not present for the offline audience. Google Trends gives relative search data and not concrete data. Therefore, we need to filter this audience data further.
The data of search items that have been searched with a relatively low frequency will not be shown by Google Trends. Also, the authentication of the data obtained from Google Trends needs to be verified in order to remove data repetition and other contaminants such as fake data or unverified users and bots.
2. Surveys
Surveys form a backbone for filtering the offline audience. A simple yet popular old-school source of information is the surveys carried out to understand the target audience and the competitive brands that your audience is fond of.
Nowadays, surveys are preferred to be completely autonomous and confidential to preserve an individual’s privacy and give more accurate results since the audience on which surveys are conducted enjoy their confidentiality.
The simple yet most widely used survey tool is Google Forms that allows the flexibility of building one without many skills required, and you can also apply the validation option to control the quality of data entry.
Apart from the positives, there are few downsides to this tool such as the forms are connected to the internet. Hence, they require you to be online while making any modifications to it or collecting data. The security is compromised when passwords are weak, and there are limitations in terms of uploading the files (JPG & PDFs) and images (2MB limit).
The other popular tool is SurveyMonkey which has been adopted by many companies because of its easier access, minimization of error in input, and data coding. The basic version enables faster distribution, saving cost and time.
The survey customization is simple and can be shared through various channels. However, the downside is the low response rates due to the lack of restrictions offered by any tools on the audience being surveyed and the size of the questions. SurveyMonkey gives a versatile deck of different types of questionnaires making customization easy and adaptable.
The outcome of the surveys and Google Trends will filter the open audience data as a combination of offline and online audience data to 75%. The audience data obtained from the above two tools are still vague and far from your core audience.
3. Social Media Analytics
Social media is a key to communicate with your target audience. While you want to gather information about your audience, you need to understand from which social media channel your audience is coming from.
For example, if your website contains many photographs and you would like to showcase them to younger audiences, then you need to tap channels like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp.
- Facebook: The Facebook Audience Insights dashboard is pretty straightforward to understand. Also, you can directly fetch the sources of your post likes and external referrals, which is very common in Google Analytics. Users can find insights of their Facebook pages like impressions, comments, and implement feedback to improve performance right from the dashboard.
- Instagram: As per the Instagram Global Audience Distribution Report of January 2021 by H. Tankovska, two-third of the global Instagram audiences were aged below 34 years and younger. On the flip side, it is difficult to export the data to Excel, and the information is in percentages rather than the actual number, which requires further calculations.
- YouTube: The older audience above 35 years is often found on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. If we consider YouTube Analytics, its user interface is easy to interpret, and the tool is free. The YouTube Analytics dashboard gives detailed information about audience views, revenues, demographics, and more or less the complete persona of your audience. The analytics data can be exported into spreadsheets as well.
- Third-party Social Media Management: Tools such as Audiense, Agorapulse, and Quick Sprout, recognize the target audience that correlates to your brand or blogs and send them personalized messages effectively.
These tools, using advanced machine learning AI (Artificial Intelligence), come in handy to analyze the interests, behavior and narrow down on the competitive brands that your audience is currently pursuing.
The modern social media analytics tools use “insights” to identify and categorize their audience.
Many of these tools are free and offer paid advertisements to increase audience reach and engagement. Social media analytics also highlights widespread communication that your audience enjoys and lays the foundation for future audience engagement strategies.
The target audience filtration downsizing value obtained in this stage is about 35% and needs to be filtered till we get the core audience.
4. Reddit
Reddit is a modern revolution of the internet, with empowering social news and web content ratings. It is also an open forum for discussions. More than 430 million active Reddit users worldwide make the website very popular and trending to build your audience.
Lately, Reddit’s ecosystem also includes live stream content through Reddit Public Access Network, allowing users to upload their content in terms of links, text posts, and images.
This content is then voted up or down by other members forming posts that are organized by theme into a user-created bulletin called “communities” or “subreddits,” which comprises various topics such as political news, movies, online gaming, books, music, cooking, sports, and pets. The up-votes on post results contribute for the post to appear on the top of their subreddit and eventually on the site’s front page.
To find your target audience on Reddit, you need to just type your keywords in the subreddit search tool and look upon the relative conversations that pop up in the search results. You will see the count of “upvotes” between the arrows on the left-hand side of the post, which shows how popular your topic is among the Reddit audience. Collate the seats in the subreddit area, allowing this to be your databank.
This data will help you create the exact content that rhymes in sync with your audience. The projected results will help you to understand the area of interests of your target audience straining them to a value of 15% of the open audience.
5. Quora
Quora is a great place where the audience gains and shares their knowledge. This platform enables users to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers.
The only point that differentiates Google and Quora, is that Quora allows users to place their opinions based on factual information, making marketers understand their target audiences actual requirements. You can directly ask any questions to the Quora audience that help you boost your engagement with the audience.
For example, you can ask “how I can become a millionaire by writing blogs.” People will try to answer with the links/references to the blogs site they usually read, tell you ways to collaborate with brands to earn profits, offer some popular and interesting topics, and share this question with others to have more opinions.
At this stage, the cream of the coffee floats on the top i.e. 10% filtration of the open audience and it delivers the core target audience.
The process of pinpointing your target audience is complicated as the emotions vary with the products or services offered. The popularity of any product is directly related to the feeling it accomplishes or the problem it is trying to solve.
The tools mentioned in this article are bound to make the process simpler and would share clear insights on the audiences you plan to target for your business.
