To succeed with your digital marketing efforts, you’ve got to get to know your audience.

No matter what you’re selling, how great your SEO and social media strategy is, or how much you pay your digital marketing team, you’re not going to get very far without understanding who your audience is and what motivates them. Finding your niche audience is the key that unlocks your business’s potential.

It’s easier said than done, of course. If every company knew its audience as well as they thought they did, everyone would be happy. 

Fortunately, you’ve got us at Site Report Card to help you. Today, we’re going to tell you how to identify and target your niche audience so you can reap the benefits of a well-constructed marketing campaign.

Stop dumping money into marketing that isn’t directed at anything. Let us help you find that direction and save you time, money, and effort.

Is Your Product Viable?

Being able to identify your niche audience and market your business to them has several smaller issues wrapped up in it. Before you start assessing your marketing efforts, you need to assess or reassess your product’s market viability.

If you’re having a lot of trouble getting your product off the ground, it’s likely because you haven’t properly identified your niche. Go back to the drawing board and look at who you’re trying to target and who your current customers are.

A lot of young businesses are misguided when it comes to narrowing their focus, especially in the beginning. When you try to target too many customers with your product(s), you run the risk of entering a more established brand’s turf.

Your product should solve a particular problem or fill a gap that no other product in your area does. To figure this out, you’ve got to do some extensive research into what your competitors are doing right and wrong.

Researching Your Competition

Doing a little bit of reconnaissance into your competition is a rite of passage for all burgeoning entrepreneurs. When you’re starting out in any field, you have to figure out what’s already being done, so you can make a viable product instead of a redundant one.

It’s also important to analyze the quality of your competitors. If you think you can do what they’re doing, but better, then there’s a potentially lucrative opportunity there. Look at the quality of their product, their website, social media, and content and determine where you can outdo them and take away their market share.

This part of the process is all about finding out how large a piece of the pie you can get. If there’s a gap in the market or a lackluster business taking up too much of the market, develop your product around filling that gap and beating your competition. 

Finding Your Niche Audience

Finding a nice audience for your product sounds easy. After all, if you make a product that fulfills the needs of a specific group of people, shouldn’t they want to buy it?

Well, you’ve got to do a bit more work than that. To grab the attention of the right audience, you’ve got to market the product to them in a way that makes sense. To market your product in an effective way, you need to get to know who this audience is.

This means that you’ve got to do even more research. This time, you’ll be looking at the demographics of your niche audience. Consider the age, gender, income level, education level, marital status, and occupation of the audience that you currently have and the one you’ll be targeting.

Once you’ve accurately identified who you’re trying to sell your product to, you can begin to figure out how to advertise to them.

Targeting New Customers

Targeting an audience is where many businesses get stuck. It’s hard to figure out what makes a large group of disparate people tick and even harder to convince them to buy a product they’ve never heard of. 

To figure out how to market to your audience, you can once again look at your competition. Assess their marketing efforts by looking at what they’re doing that works and what they’re doing completely wrong. Using someone else as an example is always a good way to find the correct path.

Also, look to other businesses in other markets that your target demographic is typically fond of. You can take a lot from looking at a successful marketing campaign from a business that has nothing to do with yours. It’ll give you a really good idea of how to approach branding, developing your voice, and visuals.

Marketing

Branding and marketing to a niche audience go hand-in-hand. When you put the work into figuring out who your audience is and getting to know them on a human level, then you can create a brand that their certain to respond to.

When you’re ready to launch your marketing efforts, you have to look to web development, content marketing, and social media marketing. These days, it’s possible to build a really strong brand with an engaging blog and a popular social media following.

You can also use things like SEO and PPC advertisements to get more traffic on your site. At the end of the day, you want the people that need your product to be able to find you, so follow the latest digital marketing trends and promote your business the way it ought to be promoted.

Develop a Niche, Expand Later

For small businesses that are just starting out, narrowing your focus is the smartest way to get a niche audience right out of the gate. Having this small but dedicated audience allows you to grow organically and slowly expand your horizons over a period of time.

Businesses often try to get too big, too fast and end up failing because of it. Take your time, find your niche, and develop your marketing skills until you’re ready to take the plunge into different markets.

Did you find this article helpful? Come back and visit us again at Site Report Card, where you’ll find hundreds of articles on anything from digital marketing to SEO, to niche advertising and brand advice.