How to Find Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is central to your marketing strategy; it’s the foundation you’ll build all of your content from. You need to know your customers in order to reach and engage with them. Whether you’re a new author trying to connect with readers or a content creator branching into new kinds of content, knowing your audience will dramatically improve your chances of turning casual readers into fans.
Today, we’ll examine some effective strategies for identifying your target audience. I’ll keep it simple and focus on creators with a small audience who are working to grow their content business.
Audience information is vital for conducting market research, using social media platforms, and leveraging powerful AI tools.
The Value of Knowing Your Audience
When you know who you are speaking to with your emails, social posts, blogs, or videos, you can tailor your content and services to meet the expectations of your target market. This knowledge is key to building brand awareness and engagement. A deep understanding of the people already buying your books, courses, or services is the best way to find more people like them.
Each touchpoint with your audience provides information and insights. That might be a Facebook group for a specific group of people (like serial romance authors or marketing experts) or the emails you send your existing customers.
Methods For Finding Your Audience
There are two paths: one involves looking for new people online, and the other involves extracting information about your current customers.
The first method is a little simpler and requires a bit of guesswork. Let’s start there.
Discovering Your Initial Audience
If you’re a new creator, the first and most important thing you can do is create content. Before you can even think about building an audience, you need something to offer them.
Once you’ve created some content, whether a blog, video series, online course, or podcast, you can naturally start building an audience just by sharing it. Where you share that content is key.
The first stage of finding your audience usually involves social media channels. Deciding which ones to be on might be intuitive—if you write educational or coaching content, Facebook is full of groups you can join; if you are a tech writer crafting guides and manuals, you’ll want to be on LinkedIn.
Once you’ve established where your audience hangs out online, you’ll want to understand what kinds of media they consume. That can include social accounts or influencers they follow, video content, courses, webinars, and, of course, the books they read.
Pay extra attention to the books your fans read—these are commonly known as comparable titles in the publishing industry. These books will be similar in style, content, and design to the book you want to create. Make a list of the books and their authors. Then use an AI tool to ask where those authors are active on social media. Here’s a sample for the famous author James Patterson.
I started by asking ChatGPT to research Patterson and learn about his author business. Patterson is an easy example because his author platform is massive, so he’s on a lot of platforms.
AI also helps by telling us a little about Patterson’s posts so we can better understand his audience and goals for each platform.
Now, imagine you’re a mystery writer who likes to make videos about your writing process. You might use the information about where Patterson is active and the content he posts to decide on YouTube and Twitter.
With just a little research, you can begin to narrow your focus to the most relevant social platforms. As you establish your presence on your preferred platform, you can grow your business and your audience.
Of course, you’ll want to find five or ten comparable authors and research them. Don’t just rely on ChatGPT—once you’ve got some high-level information, go to those social platforms and actually look at the content those authors create (and follow them!).
Building From Your Existing Audience
If you already have some fans or followers, you’ll have a step up in finding more fans. This is largely based on the wealth of data you have about consumer behavior and purchase decisions from your existing audience. The trick is finding and using that data effectively.
How you learn about your social followers will depend on their social platform. You can read about specifics for the most popular ones from our social media team.
The best way to get real-time tracking for your website is to use Google Analytics. You have lots of other options for aggregating site data (like SEMRush or AHREFs). Google Analytics remains the best choice simply because it’s pervasive. You’ll never struggle to find YouTube videos or long-form guides teaching you how to use Google Analytics.
Along with Google Analytics, their Search Console dashboard (also free) will give you a ton of search data. It allows you to understand how people find your site, which pages they are landing on, and what they do once they find your pages. This information is crucial for developing marketing strategies tailored to your audience’s needs and preferences.
Here is a short list of things you can learn from Google Analytics and Search Console:
- How many people visit your site
- Search terms they use to find your site
- Pages they land on
- How long they stay on any page
- The next page they visit
- The page they leave your site from
- Products and services purchased
- The most popular day and time for site traffic
Seriously, this list goes on and on.
The important part is figuring out how to turn your data into an effective marketing strategy that reaches a new audience. To do that, you’ll need to use your information to conduct market research and develop ‘buyer personas’ for your audience.
Conducting Market Research
In-depth market research allows you to understand your target audience beyond surface-level data. You’ll combine your own data about your audience with feedback from your current and potential customers.
One of the best and simplest forms of market research is a survey. What I love about surveys is that they work whether you have an audience or not. The key is to craft a survey that asks the right questions and put it in front of the right niche market to create an ‘ideal customer.’
Don’t overcomplicate this. If you have a customer base, maybe send them a survey via email asking simple questions like:
- What do you find valuable about the content that I’ve created?
- What kinds of content would you like to see from me?
- Would you be willing to do a quick interview with me?
I’ll mention one tool that I love for audience research: Sparktoro. Their free option limits you to 5 queries per month, but you don’t need to use a lot of searches to get a lot out of this tool.
With Sparktoro, you’ll search for a keyword—ideally, one based on the market research and Search Console data you’ve gathered—and they’ll help you understand the characteristics and behaviors of people who use that search term (or similar ones). This might seem a bit opaque at first, but you can use this information to learn about social media groups people similar to your audience are part of, sites those people visit, and some demographic data like age and region.
Building (and Using) Buyer Personas
Alright, you’ve done your research—dug into social media, found some similar authors to follow for inspiration and information, set up Google’s tracking tools for real-time data about your site—you should be starting to get a good sense of your target audience.
This alone is going to help you find your potential fans and grow your audience. But you need to create buyer (or reader) personas to hone your digital marketing and business strategy.
Historically, personas have been a difficult, time-consuming, and labor-intensive process.
Luckily, today’s artificial intelligence tools make creating personas for your author or creator business much easier.
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Using AI for Your Target Audience Personas
If you haven’t been getting into using AI for your content outlining, research, and planning, you should. That comes with a big disclaimer: Artificial Intelligence won’t be creating your content. Or, if it does, you won’t be very successful.
What you should use AI for is to simplify complex tasks. Here’s what ChatGPT told me it can do to help my audience research:
AI tools are capable of detecting complex patterns in data that are often imperceptible to human analysts. This capability allows for a more detailed and nuanced understanding of audience segments. Specific AI platforms specialize in analyzing demographic and psychographic data, offering insights that are precise and actionable. Utilizing AI to drive your marketing decisions can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. AI insights ensure that your marketing messages are delivered to the right audience at the right time, maximizing impact and engagement.
Note that ChatGPT said nothing about creating content, personas, or even planning documents. It’s purely a research tool for processing a lot of data and making sense of that data so you can use it.
How can you use AI to create your buyer personas? For a really in-depth, complex AI built using multiple platforms, I suggest watching Andrew Davis’ content about Digital Doppelgangers. I’ll break it down in a simple way here.
Creating Your AI Persona
Artificial Intelligence might seem smart, but they’re really just a mirror for the content fed into them. That means your first step is to teach your AI about you and your content. Share links to your site, tell it your goals, explain pain points you want to solve, and anything else you think will be relevant.
Prompt your AI (I recommend ChatGPT or Gemini for this task) to tell you what it’s learned and adjust its knowledge until it understands you, your business and content, and your goals.
Pro tip: Tell the AI to take its time. They often try to get a response to you as soon as possible, but telling them to slow down will lead to better results.
Take all that you’ve learned from following creators with similar content, compiling Google’s data, and scouring social media and put it into your AI platform.
Add a prompt to let your AI know what you’re doing with that data. Here’s a sample prompt:
We’re creating a buyer persona for [my website URL], who will buy [my products] and is interested in [my content types]. Use the data I provide to understand my ideal customers and perform a competitive analysis of similar creators to create the persona.
That prompt will likely result in a pretty mediocre persona, but it’s a starting point! Keep refining your persona through prompts and instructions until it closely resembles the audience you’re looking for.
If you’re using a paid version of ChatGPT and have the option to build your own GPTs, you can take that persona information and create a custom AI trained to act like your persona. This is so powerful—with a well-trained AI persona, you can ask it questions you’d ask your fans or potential customers, which enables you to learn more about your audience’s habits and interests.
Finding Your Target Audience
We’re 2,000 words deep into this post, and yes, we’re just now getting to finding your audience. The takeaway is that you can’t just jump into a Facebook group or Discord channel and hope to find an audience. Likewise, you can’t just create blog posts or videos and earn new followers from organic search.
You need to know who you’re targeting, what they want or need, and how to connect with them.
For example, your research and prompting with your AI persona might lead you to learn that you’re doing great getting people to click your social posts to come to your site, but they aren’t buying your books or reading your blog posts. That insight shows you need to work on your customer experience—maybe new labels for your call to action or clearer site navigation—so that people who love your posts can easily find your products.
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Crafting a Marketing Plan Based on Audience Insights
I know this is all kind of vague—that’s because researching and finding your audience is a highly personal task. It has to be heavily informed by you, your brand, your content, and your goals. This is vital research to understand your audience’s preferences so your promotional, informative, and entertaining content meets their expectations and needs.
Checking those two boxes is one of the best ways to customize your marketing approach and increase sales by simply giving your fans (both old and new) precisely what they want.
Your research and persona (or personas if you have a range of content and audiences) are dynamic tools for the future of your business as well. The more you know your specific audience and their wants/needs, the better prepared you’ll be to create new content, plan new marketing goals, and continue to delight your fans with amazing content that leads to a sustainable business for you.
