Figuring out your target audience

Welcome to The Digital Brew, a podcast about making your business more awesome online.

Your hosts are Angela (a copywriter) and Stew (a web designer). Pour yourself a cuppa and let’s get started with today’s episode…

In this episode, we talk about how to figure out your target audience.

This could be useful for you if you’re just getting started in business, or you’re ready to stop targeting everyone and really focus on reaching a specific audience.

So, what’s a target audience?

You might hear this referred to as an ideal client, target market, or even a niche. They’re the people or person that you want to reach and connect with through your marketing.

Since we’ve only just launched our new brand and gone through this process of figuring out a target audience ourselves, we thought we’d share about how we did it.

But first of all, why should you bother with identifying a target audience?

Back when we started our first business, we targeted everyone. We would accept just about any client that wanted to pay us money! And hey, we figured that we would enjoy the variety.

But that was a biiiig mistake.

Because targeting everyone is sort of like targeting no one.

Think about it…

When you’re making friends with other people, what makes you most want to be someone’s friend? 

Having something in common with them and them being very interested in you and understanding you.

It’s the same with business.

People will be more likely to enquire and work with you if they can see that:

• You have something in common
• You’re interested in them
• You understand them (and their problems)

Choosing a target audience means you can articulate all of this in your marketing and really design your business around the specific needs of this person or group.

When you do that, you might get fewer leads over all, but your conversion rate will be a lot higher and you’ll be able to put a higher price on things because you’re a specialist.

Okay, so how do you choose a target audience?

There are lots of ways to do this. Think about:

• What you’re interested in
• Your capabilities
• What you can do a really good job on
• What you’re experienced in
• Who you’re most like
• Where you see yourself in the future
• Where you can learn the most
• Where you can get more leads in the future
• The size of the market (you want a group that’s big enough that you’ll get consistent leads, but not so big that you’ll have too many competitors to stand out)

So what about us? Who is our target audience?

Actually, we haven’t honed in on it too much just yet. That’s because our portfolio is still pretty broad from a few years ago and it doesn’t tell a consistent story. Plus, we’re not too sure where we want to put our focus just yet. 

We won’t stay like this forever, though. Probably within the next year, we’ll have narrowed it down a bit more.

But for now, our target audience is service based businesses. Mainly consultants and tradespeople. That’s because we’ve done a lot of that kind of work, they’re a good fit for our package, and we know we can do a really good job.

I (Angela) have had a bit more experience niching in my freelance content writing business. I started out as a marketer, focused on digital, then moved into being a copywriter/content writer for anyone. Next, I honed in on writing for B2B brands. Now I’m mainly working with tech companies.

It’s a gradual process, as you realise what you’re best at, what you like doing, and what pays well. Then you get more of those clients, more testimonials, more recommendations, and more portfolio pieces. Which leads to more of those clients!

We expect it’ll be the same for TDB.

Okay, so let’s wrap it up with a few key takeaways.

First up, it’s okay if you don’t have a target audience yet. You can change this as you go along.

But do at least start to narrow things down so you can get a general idea of who you want to work with. Then you’ll keep honing in on this over time, adjusting your copy to target them more as you go.

Each time you narrow your audience down further, your marketing will get clearer and more compelling, and you’ll be able to charge more as you’re more of a specialist.

Don’t make your target audience everyone. 

And as a side note – one thing I actually like to do is identify an ideal client. An individual person – made up or real. And create all the marketing copy around this one person’s pain points, needs, goals, wants, and desires. It doesn’t mean you’re excluding the other 7 billion people on the planet. It will, however, make your message and marketing so much stronger.

Okay, that’s it for today. 

We’ll catch you in the next episode, which is all about developing brand guidelines.
Thanks for tuning in to The Digital Brew with Ange and Stew. Make sure you head over to thedigitalbrew.com for more episodes, detailed show notes, resources, and our newsletter. And if you feel like this episode has helped make your business more awesome, pop us a review. We’ll catch you next time!