9 Questions to Ask Your Target Audience

To advertise to your audience effectively, you need to have a deep understanding of them. Getting to know your audience with their wants and needs helps you craft the tone of your messaging for them specifically. If you develop an honest view of your target customer, you’ll be better suited to establish a strong connection. Your marketing efforts and ads will be likely to resonate, making your campaigns stronger and ad spend more efficient.

To better understand your audience, you need to know who they are and what they want from you. Here are some specific questions you should ask your audience to get a better sense of them.

1. Who Represents the Demographic You’re Trying to Reach?

The first step toward understanding your audience is to look at their specific target demographics. You will need to determine their age, gender, and income levels,  as well as other characteristics, like whether they’re married or in college. Try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and walk through a day in their life. Consider what that would look like and how and when they might want to interact with your brand. Demographics give a good indication of what people want and how likely they are to purchase. If someone is newly establishing themselves or right out of college, they won’t be able to make purchases like someone older.

2. Where Are They Located?

You also need to figure out where your audience is most likely to live, both in broad terms and within specific areas. People living in the Chicago Loop will have a different experience than those living in the surrounding suburbs or remote, rural areas. From there, you can specify towns or cities that you would like to target. You’ll need to adjust how you advertise to them. Someone in the city may rely more on walking and public transit, so they’ll encounter outdoor ads. Whereas, someone living in the suburbs may rely more on driving and will listen to the radio instead. 

3. What Is Their Industry?

It’s crucial to find out what your audience does. It can be beneficial whether you’re marketing to people in your audience’s job capacity or want to learn more about their lifestyle. Your business may provide productivity software to real estate agents as a B2B business. At the same time, those in B2C industries may simply want to get a better feel for consumers’ lives. Knowing people’s industries also gives you insight into their work lives. If your audience tends to hold desk jobs, you can target your ads for the morning and evening, before and after work. However, if you’re targeting an atypical group, your ads can air at non-peak times for more cost-efficiency.

4. How Much Does Your Audience Earn?

In addition to the industry they work in, find out what kind of salary your audience brings in. This information can help inform your pricing strategies. Otherwise, you may either charge too little, minimizing ROI, or charge too much to the point where people simply turn away. That allows you to plan your pricing to entice your audience, making them more likely to purchase. 

5. What Are Their Preferred Communication Channels?

Once you figure out who your audience is, you need to know where to reach them. It’s essential to figure out how to get your audience’s information and follow up where they’re most receptive. If you want to launch a radio ad campaign, you need to figure out which stations your audience likes. Different stations appeal to different audiences, so simply targeting as many local stations as possible won’t be effective. Instead, figure out what stations make the most sense based on your audience’s interests, whether they listen to a particular music genre or prefer talk radio. You’ll reach a different crowd airing ads on 101.9 THE MIX compared to SHE 100.3. 

6. What Do They Do in Their Free Time?

Knowing what your audiences do for a living can be invaluable, but so can learning about what they do in their free time. Finding out what your audience does off the clock can help you better understand how your customers think, along with the behaviors and attitudes they represent. Based on their personality type, your audience will have specific hobbies and interests to inform your campaigns. Consider whether your audience spends time on social media, where they vacation, and how they consume content. You should also find out whether they enjoy activities like reading, streaming online videos, or playing video games, all of which can help you with targeting.

7. What Are Their Biggest Pain Points?

Specific audiences face equally specific challenges. Determine which pain points your audience faces to figure out how best to help them. You may find that there are specific challenges that your competitors aren’t touching on, which you can address with your content. As a result, you can fill certain gaps in the market and more persuasively promote the solutions you offer. You can also use this to develop your company’s unique advantage or USP. It allows you to differentiate your company from the competition to advertise to your own customer niche.

8. How Do They Make Purchasing Decisions?

Your audience will also likely have a specific way of making buying decisions, which you’ll want to consider. Find out what effectively influences your audience to develop your strategies further. Knowing how people research your offerings and find out which features they prioritize can help you optimize your ads, content, and overall messaging.  You can shape the tone of your advertising to be informative or conversational based on which is more likely to resonate with your audience.

9. What Is the Biggest Hurdle Preventing Them from Using Your Service?

If people simply aren’t connecting with you and you’re not sure why it’s crucial to identify what’s keeping people from becoming customers. Use surveys and other methods of reaching out to your audience to pinpoint why they’re not using your services. Based on this input, you can either figure out how to more effectively convince people to use your services or determine what internal changes you need to make. In other words, depending on what’s deterring people, you may need to modify the way you communicate with audiences or optimize the services themselves. Finding out why people aren’t buying your products is incredibly valuable information and allows you to improve your sales growth by strengthening your current efforts instead of seeking new ones. You can resolve small issues or find entirely new approaches you hadn’t previously thought of.

Understand Your Audience to Drive Conversions

By asking each of these questions, you can better understand your audiences and the way they think, live, and buy. Subsequently, this understanding can help you target your ads most effectively to convert customers. Before developing your campaign, take the time to perform in-depth audience research, which will ultimately give you the upper hand over less diligent competitors.