In business, it is tempting to try to reach as many potential customers as possible. While broadening your company’s reach is an important goal to pursue, doing so strategically and effectively is important. How can you do this? You can start by finding and focusing on your target audience. Catering to your target audience can make it easier to connect with them and to build lasting customer relationships.
Keep reading for insight into how to find a potential target audience.
Embrace Analytics
One major perk of living in a digital world is that researching your target audience is easier than ever before. Thanks to technology we now have access to valuable analytics that can provide us with insight into our target audience.
To start, take a look at your website and social media channels analytics to see who is spending time on your website or looking at your content. You might find that people in your region or country make up the majority of the traffic, but you may also find people in foreign countries are visiting your site and that there might be an opportunity to expand to a new target market.
For websites, Google Analytics offers a free and very powerful suite of data analytic tools you can utilize. You can see where your website visitors are coming from, where they live, which pages they visit most frequently, how long they’re spending on your site, and what their demographics are—amongst other important data. When it comes to social media, most platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all offer free analytic tools that give you insight into who your followers are and how they’re interacting with your social media profiles.
Tapping into the data surrounding where your audience is coming from can help you find what regions your business appeals to. Then you can create a localization strategy that allows you to better service that specific audience. For example, if your website is getting a ton of traffic from a region or country that speaks a different language than your website is displayed in, you may want to invest in localization and international SEO to attract even more visitors from that region.
Do Market Research
Once you have an idea of where a target audience is located, you can do market research to determine if these markets are truly viable and a good fit for your product or service. You can do this by researching how a new target market differs from one you’re currently serving successfully.
When researching a new target audience, try to dig up the following data points about that specific audience:
- Market conditions
- In-demand products or services
- Average purchasing power and income
- Barriers to entry
- Local laws and regulations
- Cultural norms
- How your business stands out from competitors servicing that audience
Determine Whether Translation, Localization, or Transcreation is Needed
If a new target market you want to tap into speaks a different language, you need to determine whether you need to pursue translation, localization, or transcreation to ensure that your products and customer communications better resonate with this new audience. Even if the new audience is in the same region as another one of your existing audiences, you’ll need to confirm whether or not the new audience speaks a different variant of the language your existing audience speaks and adjust your communications accordingly.
