A target audience is a compilation of characteristics that make up your ideal customer. Without having these critical elements established, it’s nearly impossible to understand how impactful your current marketing efforts are. Here, we will discuss the target audience questions you should be asking.
Clicks and engagement are great, right? The answer is, well… sometimes. If those clicks and engagement aren’t coming from the right people, they’re basically good as none. Now, that sounds harsh, but by doing research and your due diligence, you’ll set yourself on track for long-term success.
Start with the basics. Once you have your age, location, interests, job title, revenue, gender and goals established, you have to go much deeper and be more particular. Here are a few target audience questions that will help you hone in even deeper.
What Are Their Main Pain Points?
If you do nothing else but narrow down their main pain points, you’ve done enough to fuel topics among your content that will make you more searchable. Afterall, the success of any marketing campaign is dependent on how well you understand your target audience’s pain points. This is also what is ultimately going to fuel their decision for purchase, so knowing this is key.
So how do you figure out what these pain points are?
Check Out Discussion Forums
Reddit, Quora and other discussion formats can give you great insights to exactly what your current customer base is struggling with. They’ll ask for advice from peers and you can take those ideas and gain an understanding for where they’re struggling.
Do Keyword Research
What is your audience really looking for or what are they wanting to know? With 52% of B2B buyers claiming they are more likely to buy from a brand once they’ve read or engaged with their content, you best prioritize figuring out the answer. However, you can’t know this without doing a little bit of research yourself. Using tools like Moz and Ahrefs will help you gain insights into topics your prospective customers are already searching for and provide insights for your blogs, ads, social media content and more.
Ask Your Current Customers
What better way to hear straight from the source? Find out what’s keeping your potential customers up at night by leveraging your current network. Send out a survey and ask what ultimately led them to partnering with your business. Or ask them during a check-in or interaction. It never hurts to leverage knowledge from someone who has been in your prospects shoes.
How Can I Get My Information In Front of Them?
This is one of the most critical target audience questions. You can have amazing content, but what good is it if it’s never seen? After you establish pain points and create content that addresses them, it’s time to make sure this content is found–which comes from diversifying your content.
Guest Posting
Posting other places aside from your own blog is extremely valuable, and many underestimate the power of guest posting. It can provide you with thought leadership credibility, SEO benefits, as well as provide another place for your audience to find you. Do some research into blogs that align with similar discussion topics where your insights would be relevant. Pitch yourself as an expert, and dive into what you could offer to their audience. You might have to pay to play in this space, but the benefits are well worth the cost.
Social Media
With 50% of B2B buyers using social media as a resource during their buying process, it’s critical to know which platforms will move the needle for your business. Do some research on the demographics of each platform’s users and compare them to your own. LinkedIn and Facebook also have features that allow professionals to create groups.Search those and see if your audience appears there. This research will help you avoid wasting time posting on irrelevant platforms, and leverage the ones that matter.
Depending on your demographics, maybe they missed your latest blog post and your promotion of it on social media. Why not send a recap in a newsletter or an individual email with the key takeaways from your latest blog post? B2B professionals spend quite a bit of time checking their email on a daily basis. Make sure your subject line is engaging and highlights the value of your content.
How is Your Competition Going About it?
As a marketer, you can learn so much about how to set yourself apart and hoan in on your target audience just by consistently monitoring your competition. This can allow you to create content that is engaging and different.
So often we focus on what causes our audience to be loyal, that we neglect doing deep research into what would cause them to leave.
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that this digital world has allowed us to express our opinions both good and bad. So this information about your competition is out there, it’s just a matter of taking the time to do the research, learn, and apply your findings so you can set yourself apart.
Read Reviews
Take a look at your competitors’ reviews. This can help you know why your prospective client had a bad experience, and what’s also keeping their customers around. Sites like Capterra or G2Crowd and Google are great places to start.
Research Discussion Forums
Type in your competition’s name to sites like Reddit. More often than not, you can gain insights into what they are doing well, and where people have really been upset by them.
Read Their Blog
See how your competition addresses your audience by reading their blogs and case studies. See what language they’re using and what issues they’re discussing. If you can, use tools like Ahrefs to see what kind of engagement they’re getting on that page, and what keywords their ranking for.
