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As an affiliate marketer, you probably see a lot of advice related to your “target audience”. Much of the guidance offered to content creators involves optimizing your site and your marketing strategy for this segment of the web.
However, such suggestions are difficult to follow if you're not sure how to find your target audience in the first place.
The good news is that your audience is often hiding in plain sight. And once you're clear about who your target audience is and what matters most to them, you can increase your affiliate marketing income through strategic content creation and user engagement.
In this article, we'll dig deeper into why knowing your target audience is so important if you want to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Then we'll share three tips on how to find yours. Let's get started!
Why Having a Clear Target Audience Is Vital for Affiliate Marketers
Before we go any further, let's take a brief look at the evolution of marketing. Until the last 20 years or so, the primary strategy most businesses followed was “broadcast marketing”.
This technique is concerned with getting your brand in front of as many people as possible, regardless of whether it's relevant to them or not. Billboards, television commercials, and radio ads are examples of broadcast marketing.
However, thanks largely to the internet, targeted marketing is now the preferred strategy for most brands. Instead of pouring money into channels that may or may not reach high-quality leads, businesses can use their budgets more effectively. They can focus on the audiences that are most likely to convert and become paying customers.
This is where your target audience comes in. This refers to the group (or groups) of people who are most likely to resonate with your brand and convert. Your target audience influences your success as an affiliate marketer in many ways, including:
- The type of content you produce. If your target audience prefers video content, you'll probably be more successful publishing content on YouTube than running a blog.
- The brands you partner with. When choosing what products and brands to promote, it's important to stick to those that are relevant to your target audience and align with their values.
- Which social media networks you use. Your target audience probably has preferred platforms they use to follow content creators they like. Maintaining an active presence on the right social media sites can help you connect with your audience and drive more clicks.
In short, when you know your target audience, you know where to find the people who are most likely to buy what you're selling (and how to convince them to do so).
How to Define Your Target Audience (3 Key Tips)
While the benefits of knowing your target audience are straightforward, understanding who makes up this segment can be a bit more tricky. Fortunately, there are three easy ways to find the answers you need.
1. Look at Your Existing Audience (If You Have One)
If you're just getting started as an affiliate marketer, this method may not apply to you. However, if you've been creating content online for some time – and perhaps even making money doing so – you probably already have an audience.
Doing some research into who currently follows you and what they like about your content can help you narrow down your optimal target audience. There are at least two top sources of information you'll want to consult:
- Google Analytics. You can use this platform to view demographics for your website's visitors, including their genders, ages, languages, locations, and more. You can also see what content on your site is most popular.
- Social media analytics. Tools such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and Twitter Analytics can provide similar data for your social media followers.
Once you've assessed your results, you should have a good picture of the types of visitors you're already attracting. You can then use this information to start building audience profiles, and to do further research on the content and products that appeal to those groups.
2. Determine What Problems You Have Solutions To, and Who Faces Those Problems
People often take to the web to find solutions to the challenges they're facing. That's why you'll often see affiliate marketing advice that encourages you to identify your target audience's pain points, so you can address them by recommending relevant products or services.
This process can also work in reverse to help you define your target audience. Start by identifying what problem(s) your content and your partners' products address. Then figure out which demographics are facing those challenges – they're your target audience.
For example, say you run a health and fitness blog, and you're partnering with a brand that creates online workout classes. You have solutions that can help people who want to exercise, but who can't or don't want to go to a gym.
Potential target audiences could include:
- Professionals in demanding positions, who don't have time to go to the gym
- People who don't have the money to afford a traditional gym membership
- Those who live far away from a gym
- Newcomers to fitness who may feel self-conscious about going to a gym for the first time
Depending on the details of the online classes you're trying to promote, one or more of these segments will likely be relevant to your platform.
3. Examine Your Niche and Your Competitors' Audiences
Finally, one of the simplest ways to find your target audience is to look at your competitors (i.e., other creators who are producing content similar to yours). Note the types of visitors they tend to attract and what pain points they're addressing.
Similarly, you can look at general trends in your niche to determine who might be most interested in your affiliate products. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when there are plenty of other content creators out there who've already paved the way for you.
With that being said, to make this technique work for you, it's important to stand out from the crowd. While you're scouting out your competition, you'll want to pay attention to the topics they don't cover too.
This will help you identify areas where you can step in and fill gaps left by others in your niche. By doing so, you're targeting the users who aren't satisfied with the solutions your competition provides.
Conclusion
Your target audience is vital to your affiliate marketing strategy. However, it can be difficult to pinpoint who this group includes, especially when you're first starting out.
In this post, we covered three tips to help you find your target audience:
- Look at your existing audience.
- Determine what problems your content can solve, and who's facing them.
- Examine your niche and your competitors' audiences.
Do you have any questions about finding your affiliate marketing target audience? Ask away in the comments section below!
