Defining your audience is a crucial aspect of your company’s marketing and vital to any Lead Nurturing strategy, but making sure you have targeted the right potential customer can be a long and strenuous process, although it doesn’t need to be.

We are going to run through three of the best methods and tools you can use to ensure you define your audience correctly and accurately. Not only will this save you a lot of time researching methods, it will also enable you to really find out, who your perfect customer would be.

 

1 – Hubspot’s Make My Persona

Our friends at HubSpot have created a persona building tool which isn’t just simple to use, but it is also one of the most useful tools inbound marketing professionals, sales and social media teams have at their disposal.

How do you go about creating a detailed buyer’s persona I hear you ask? Well, the “Make My Persona” tool is a 18 Q&A step-by-step guide, which walks you through the questions you should ask, in order to obtain the correct and appropriate information about your buyer persona. We should note, before you begin these questions you should allow time to answer these questions, in order to obtain significant and accurate information, for your buyer persona.

When you have all of the information ready, then you are ready to begin creating your persona. Hubspot will then ask you to add internal notes by answering questions like:

• How is their job measured?
• What tools do they use to get their job done?
• What kinds of difficulties does your persona face when trying to achieve their goals?
• What are their job responsibilities and biggest challenges they face?
• What social networks do they use and How do they communicate with vendors?

Why do I need to know about what social networks they are using? I hear you ask. Well, because without knowing who your ideal customers are – for example their: backgrounds, goals, challenges, and how they behave online, then it’s very difficult to create an effective marketing strategy to attract more of those types of people. Without understanding your ideal customers inside and out and fully integrating that research across your entire marketing funnel, you then risk losing out to competitors, by stifling the growth of your business.

 

2) Google Analytics’ Demographics

By truly understanding your audience composition in terms of gender, age and interests, allows you to understand the requirements needed for your marketing campaign. These requirements could include: the information needed for creative content, media advertisement spaces you should invest in and more importantly the audiences you need to target, for future marketing and remarketing campaigns.

By using the demographics tool within Google Analytics you will be able to analyse information regarding gender, age, and interests, to determine who you should be targeting. You will also be able to segment your audience into different categories, which will serve as the basis of your remarketing audiences in Analytics.

Identifying the demographics of potentially valuable customers is useful for targeting campaigns and building audiences for remarketing. For an ecommerce site using this demographic tool is fantastic because not only can you segment by a number of dimensions like product, product category and product brand, you can also identify user groups with the highest ecommerce conversion rate or revenue, which is immensely important to ecommerce site.

Alternatively, if you are running a content-focused site, you might want to identify user groups with the highest engagement, such as session duration or pageviews/screen views, per session.

 

3) Facebook & Twitter Insights

Facebook Page Insights:

Facebook is a fantastic method for marketers and advertisers, who are aiming to define their ideal target audience. By using Facebook’s page insights tool, it allows your company to understand how people are engaging with your page, by allowing you to view metrics in relation to your page’s performance, higher read engagement and statistics regarding when your audience is using your page.

For example, you can look at each of your posts and see which ones have the most likes, comments and shares. You can use this information to create more effective and enticing content, which your audience is interested in seeing. You can also learn more about the times of day that your audience is using the Facebook page , which in turn allows you to manage when you publish your posts and notifies you when you’re more likely to reach a higher volume of traffic.

The insight tool isn’t just limited to demographic information and interests, it ranges to a number of aspects of the user’s online behaviour. Here is a list below of some of the information you would be available to you and your business:

 

Twitter Analytics:

With Twitter audience insights, you can easily discover valuable insights about your followers and the people who have engaged with your organic Tweets. You can also identify new and relevant audiences to target for an upcoming marketing campaign.

So, if you’re running a campaign to increase awareness, you can use this tool to learn about your potential customers on Twitter. So, whether this is purchasing behaviour, what trends are sought after and how these potential customers are behaving online with this information available, along with which creative content, your audience will find most compelling and engaging.

 

As you can see there are some fantastic tools and methods out there, which can help you and your company identify and define, who your perfect target audience is.

If you still feel uncertain about how to  find your ideal buyer persona and target audience, then please feel free to get in touch today as he is happy to answer any questions you may have.