How to Find Your Target Audience when you have No Experience, No Customers, or Need Help Growing Your Business
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One of the most important things you need to do when starting a business is to define your target audience. This will put you on the right track when you are promoting your business and figuring out how to appeal to your target audience. Doing so will help you increase your sales and conversion rate substantially, reduce costs on promotion, build better relationships with your audience, and help you achieve your business goals.
In this post, I will teach you a little more about
What is a target audience and why it is important.
What are the benefits of defining your target audience?
How to define your target audience when you have no experience and no customers.
I will also talk about something called a Buyer Persona - which will help you keep track of your target audience and help you with your promotions and building a trusting relationship with them. If you’d like FREE access, click the button below!
Why is defining your target audience important?
A target audience is the group of people you are aiming to sell your product or service to. They all share the same problem - when you are starting a business, you want to focus on selling the problem you solve, not the product/service you sell. Your audience also is determined by demographics like age, gender, occupation/salary, as well as geographical location, interests, challenges, goals, social media preferences, and so on. I will cover how to find this information a little later in this post.
One of the greatest things you learn in marketing school is that you do NOT want to try and sell to everyone. You need to have a targeted audience. For example, if you are selling menstrual products, you are not going to want to sell to everyone, but those who actually have that “problem”. Men won’t be interested in purchasing your product, nor will women ages 40-50 or older. If you do try to sell to everyone, you will be wasting so much money, and you won’t see the desired results with conversion rates and ROI (Return On Investment).
Another reason defining your target audience is important is so you aren’t trying to appeal to an impossible amount of people and trying to gain relationships with all of them. Another important thing to do in business is build a positive and trusting relationship with your customers. When your customers know who you are, and they know you understand their problem, they are more likely to convert to your business and buy your products or services. If you are trying to appeal to everyone, you will not only fail to build a relationship with each of them, but you will also seem less credible and you’ll miss out on building trusting relationships with the audience group that matters.
What are the benefits of defining your target audience?
Besides the fact that you’ll be more credible and be able to build positive and trusting relationships with your audience, the biggest benefit is that you will increase your conversion rates and income substantially. More of the right people will find your business and will learn more about who you are and how you will help them because you’ll know exactly how to portray that message to them. This is what increases your conversion rate. Then because you are giving the right people your product, they will be happy with your business and likely become loyal customers, coming back for more and even referring your business to others who share the same problems. This is what will increase your income.
Another benefit of defining your target audience is how much easier it will be to find the right people to come to your business. Don’t get me wrong, finding your target audience will take time, patience, and a little bit of trial and error. But once you can understand them and how to target them, you will be able to create new products and promote them a whole lot easier than trying to appeal to a wide and impossible group of people. That is why defining your niche is so important. You want to appeal to a group of people who have the same interests, challenges, and goals, and having a defined niche is a great first step to uncovering your target audience.
*Bonus Tip: When you are just starting with your business, start with one niche that can be categorized into sub-niches. For example, if your niche is about beauty you could have subcategories like hair care, nail care, skincare, and makeup. You’ll have a target market in this niche and then you’ll target different audiences for each subcategory. Then once you’ve got a good following you can grow and expand your niche go into fashion and create new subcategories from there. And of course, you will need to find your target audience in each new category/niche - but the target market will be relatively the same as long as both niches are related! If you want to learn more, I dive deeper into this in my Start a Six-Figure Blog Course!
How to define your target audience with no experience and/or no customers
When I was a couple of weeks into my blogging career, I knew from my background in marketing that I shouldn’t try to sell to everyone, but I didn’t see why it was so important to define your target audience. After wasting much money on Pinterest ads, getting thousands of impressions, and no one clicking on my ad or saving the pin, I realized I needed to change my strategy.
I had no idea really where to start and the majority of places were telling me to look at my current customers. Well, I hadn’t made a sale yet so I was a little stuck. However, I was able to find some resources that helped me do my research, and will also help you if you’re in the same boat.
First, look into Pinterest Trends. On this page, you can look up keywords related to your niche and blog topics, find what things are being searched for the most, and then also see the demographics for those keywords. For example, I searched for “how to start a blog” and it showed “Interest over time”, “Related trends”, and some “Demographics” for that keyword phrase. It will also show you, “Popular Pins” with that keyword or phrase that will give you some inspiration when you look for blog topic ideas or Pinterest pin creation ideas. You can also add up to four ideas (total) to see how keywords compare to each other. You can see the images below for example.
Another great tool is Google Trends. Because Google has way more users than Pinterest, it involves a lot more people, so you will need to be very specific with your keywords and what you research. Google Trends is a lot like Pinterest Trends, but this time you can compare up to five keywords or phrases - Pinterest Trends lets you do up to four. Google Trends also compares the breakdown of the keywords compared by region in the US so you can see which states are most interested in which topic. In this example, I was looking for what keywords would work best in this blog post - either target market or target audience. You can view the example images below.
The things you’ll want to take note of using these sites are the locations, age ranges, and gender. If you are only marketing on Pinterest, you don’t need to worry too much about what states depending on your niche. If your niche is more related to the Southern States then you will definitely want to target your ads towards people that live there.
*Bonus Tip: Take note of these keywords as they will be useful when writing blog posts and promoting your content and products/services. Especially look at which ones are looked at the most. If you want to learn more about this, I dive deeper into keyword research in my Start a Six-Figure Blog course!
Next, you will want to find what social media platforms your target audience prefers. This is especially important when it comes to advertising. You don’t want to spend all this money on Facebook ads if your target audience rarely uses Facebook. This one takes a little more research and money to understand. If you do have customers, you can create a survey and ask them which social media platforms they prefer (and make sure to include other questions like what challenges they encounter - related to your product/niche, what their goals are, what challenges have they faced with your product if any, and so on.)
If you do not have any customers yet, don’t fret. The best thing you can do in this situation is spend a little money on some ads on Pinterest, and one or two other social media platforms you think your audience uses the most. The best way to decipher this is knowing that your target audience is some version of YOU. So think about what social media platforms you prefer. And if you have friends or family that seem related to your target audience, ask them what they prefer as well! After a couple of weeks or so, Pinterest will show you the demographics of the people who have clicked on your ads. It won’t show you their preferred social media platforms or anything like that, but it’s a great way to check that your calculations are correct about your target audience - those who have saved or clicked on your pin are good indicators of your target audience. Take a look at the progress of your ads on the social media platforms you have created ads on. You may find that some social media platforms have performed better than others, meaning you’ll want to focus your ad spend on those platforms and probably stop promoting ads on the others. Make sure before you cancel any ads that you have given enough time for the social media platforms to understand how your niche or products’ algorithm works with their site. This can take anywhere from 1-3 months.
Something else you can do is look at hashtags of your keywords on Instagram or Facebook and see what type of people are using them - they are likely indicators of your target audience. Also, look at your competitors’ accounts and see who they’re following, and who follows them.
Another great practice for researching your target audience is to take note of every notable thing about them: I’ve explained some of them in this post but for easier reference here is the list of what you’ll want to note:
Age
Gender
Location: do you need to be specific about what states in the US? Or are you appealing to different countries?
Income level: helps you know how to price your products/services
Household: are they married? Do they have children?
Education: what level of education do they have? What may they already know about your product?
Career: what type of job do they have?
Schedule: can you find where they have the most free time? What are the best times to publish your content so they find it first?
Entertainment: what are their hobbies, interests, favorite books or movies, etc.?
Tech awareness: do they use their phone or desktop computer more? *This is important to know for Pinterest ads
Personality type: this helps you understand the tone to relay your message better and also understand what style appeals to them the most.
Challenges: what challenges do they face that are related to your niche/product/service?
Goals: what goals do they have that your product/service could help them achieve?
Social media preferences: Do they use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (or X), YouTube, or Pinterest?
Communication preferences: Do they prefer text messages, email, phone calls, face-to-face, video calls?
This is called a Buyer Persona. This helps you see what types of customers you have so you know how to better promote your products/services to them. You can create anywhere from 2-5 buyer personas. For example, in one of my marketing courses, we were put into a simulation to market for a made-up company named Buhi. They sold a variety of backpacks and bags. We had 4 personas:
“Business Ben” represented men aged 23-45 who needed a backpack to carry their laptops and important documents, and have room for lunches that they brought from home. Their schedule was usually at work from 9-5, coming home and eating dinner, reading some books, or learning new things using their laptop or phone.
“Seashore Sally” represented moms aged 28-40 who used bags for carrying all their items to the beach - which included their items as well as their kids' items, snacks, toys, etc. She usually had free time sporadically throughout the day, but the majority was when her kids were at school. She enjoyed reading books, learning new things, or booking new vacations from her phone or laptop.
“Active Alice” represented women aged 22-45 who needed a bag to help them carry their activewear, yoga mat, resistance bands, water bottles, etc. whenever they went to the gym. She usually worked out in the mornings or after work. Her free time was mostly in the afternoon or evenings, and she spent her free time looking up healthy recipes, spending time outside, or reading self-help books.
“Still in School Sandra” represented men and women aged 18-30 who needed a backpack to help them carry all their textbooks, laptops, lunch, and personal belongings around campus. They usually were busy until 4 or 5 in the evening and spent their free time studying, spending time with friends, or relaxing by watching movies or reading a fun book.
The personas go a little deeper and include everything from the list I gave you, but as you can see, these personas give you a little story about your target audiences and help you as you promote your products or services to them. By looking at these different personas I would be able to determine what kinds of sales to put on, how to style my ads, and what tone to use, and it helped build a better relationship with my entire audience.
I have created a template that you can use as you begin your journey to figure out your target audience and write down your different personas for each of them! You can get the template for FREE, just click the button below:)
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