Digital marketing is a dynamic, growing field with a vast array of career opportunities available. Whether you plan to create engaging content or drive traffic through SEO practices, one of the main functions of your role will be to target a specific group of people who might be interested in a particular product or service. This is a multi-step process that involves isolating a potential buyer’s interests and purchase intent, while being familiar with any subcultures they may belong to.
If you’re wondering what exactly is involved in the process of identifying a target audience, consider these three tips and be sure to use them when you become a digital marketing specialist. Learn the importance of market research, competitor analysis, and creating personas.
1. Conduct Market Research to Evaluate Market Trends
Market research involves collecting information about consumers’ needs and preferences. Traditional market research typically involves surveys, product testing, and focus groups, but digital marketers may use a variety of methods, like social media polls for quantitative research or evaluating online forums for qualitative data. Digital marketers are sometimes tasked with the collection of market research, but oftentimes, companies will outsource that task to dedicated research agencies. Defining your target audience effectively after digital marketing training will involve putting that empirical research to good use.
2. Always Analyze Competitors Throughout Your Digital Marketing Career
Keeping competitors in mind is an important practice for digital marketers. It gives you priceless insight into the audience that your competitors are appealing to, what sort of services they’re offering, and what customers like or dislike about the competitor. This information, in turn, helps you understand what your client could do in order to gain a competitive advantage over those companies. There are many software tools that allow you to determine what keywords your competitors are using to rank on Google. In addition, you can gauge the responses that your competitors are eliciting through social media and online forums.
3. Create Personas to Deepen Your Understanding
In addition to empirical research, defining your target audience requires a bit of imagination and creativity. The best and most popular way to channel this is through the development of buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of a company’s ideal buyers. Using market research and your understanding of people, come up with buyer pain points, motivations, and concerns. You may even want to give your persona a name and find a photo to bring them to life.
If you think your skill set is well suited to the activities we’ve discussed, consider a digital marketing career today! Our digital marketing diploma program at Cumberland College is designed to equip students with all the skills and knowledge they need to successfully leverage multiple digital channels to promote products and services in today’s economy.
Excited to launch your digital marketing career?
Contact Cumberland College to learn more!
