Your target audience is the group of consumers who are most likely to want you product or service. Target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests or a myriad of other factors. By identifying them correctly, you can adjust your marketing strategy so that the group of people who should see your ad campaigns are the ones seeing them. If the wrong audience is seeing your ads and content, you can end up wasting time and resources.

Here are some ways you can identify who your target audience is:

1. Look at your current customers - Identify the people who are currently purchasing from you or following your social media accounts. From these people you can try finding their shared characteristics, for example age, job, salary, etc.
2. Look at your demographics - Insights on Instagram can tell you the demographics of the people who follow you. This is useful as you can identify the type of people who like your content online.
3. Research your competitors - If there are companies that are selling a similar product to yourself and have been doing so for years, then they already know your audience very well. Look at their social media platforms, the type of people that regularly like their posts, and what is the type of content that gets a lot of response? Also, see if you are able to find the areas that aren’t working so well and try to avoid their mistakes.
4. Market research - Take time to research and find the benefits of your product or service. Identify who exactly is buying or in need of your particular services. Then you can go to popular online forums like Reddit or Twitter to see who exactly is asking questions or interested in that market.
5. How your audience finds you - Figure out where people are hearing about your product the most. Social analytics tools can help you with this. For instance, Google Analytics can tell you information about traffic arriving at your site. This can help you see the type of people going to your website as well, for example those finding you on TikTok are likely to be younger than those who find you from Facebook.

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