Marketing

The Perfect Target Audience

Identifying who you should be selling to

Photo by Caroline Veronez on Unsplash

When I began blogging, I was told to write to a specific person in my life, as that would resonate with more readers. Stephen King calls this person his “ideal reader.” In business school, they called it your “target demographic,” which has been changed in recent years to be “target audience” — I’m not sure why, maybe for broader appeal.

They all mean pretty much the same thing, but there are many techniques for finding them. Here are a few that I’ve tried:

• Data-mining other people’s audiences: looking at the followers, frequent commenters, etc., of creators to me and see what they all have in common.
• Hashtag experiments on social media: after creating a “word cloud” of content ideas, post on social media with those as hashtags and see which ones are popular, then see who’s following.
• Audience templates: this is like King’s ideal reader — you make up the sort of person interested in a subject and create with that person in mind.
• Etc.

Honestly, this list can go on for an article all its own. There are many techniques out there, and I’ve tried many of them, but only one ever worked. Hint: it wasn’t any of the ones above.