Working out your ideal audience is one of the foundational steps of an effective marketing strategy. One of the key steps that you can take to turn your business around is to pay close attention to who you are marketing to and alter your content and company message.

To get real clarity on your target audience, check out these nine tips:

1. Look at Your Current Market

By taking some time to look at the buying patterns and demographics of the people that purchase your products and services, you can get a lot of information about your business.

Study the data and consider profiling your existing customer base to find out their ages, gender, lifestyle factors and other information. Find out how they came to you and what campaigns prompted them to buy in the past.

2. Don’t Make Assumptions

Although you may think you are clear on your current audience, it makes sense to challenge those assumptions sometimes and reassess who you are serving as the business evolves.

Listen to what your audience tells you. Take time to survey or question your existing clients to get clear on what they need and want.

3. What Is Your Expertise?

Thinking about your own experience and the area that you serve in will help you to get clear on your market. Do you have a particular expertise or do you have a special knowledge about a specific area of the country?

“If you have been working with sole traders for years, it may be that you make your niche audience “sole traders in the South”,” says Josh Radcliffe, a audience analyst at Britstudent and Writemyx. “This helps people who fall into this category find you.”

Similarly, by focusing on this area, you know which websites to visit, which organizations to apply for membership of, what magazines to read and feature your business in and what networking events to visit.

4. Segment Your Audience

Once you have an idea of your audience demographic, see whether it can be segmented down further to be even more specific.

So, for example, if you have identified a target audience of lawyers, look at the characteristics that you best serve. You may enjoy working with introverted people, or lawyers who specialise in a particular area of law. By thinking critically about the segments of your audience that you can best serve, it will help you to refine your message to attract your ideal clients.

5. Create an Avatar

Understanding the persona of your ideal audience is crucial to getting clarity for your ideas and keeping the whole team on track with the same audience. An effective customer avatar will have both demographic, like age, gender and where they live, and psychological, like their roles in the family and buying habits.

6. Watch the Competition

Checking which audiences your competitors are targeting and whether they are or are not meeting their needs will help you to identify your audience and create strategies to help differentiate your business from the competition.

7. Test Campaign Messages

Run split tests on landing pages, email communications and social media campaigns to see what works best for your audience.

“The testing will also help you to identify which headlines, imagery and calls to action attract your target audience the most,” says Kevin Ratley, a tech blogger at 1Day2write and Nextcoursework. “Not every test is going to be successful, and that is okay. You will get insights from those as well that you can use to make the next campaign even better.”

8. Where Are They?

You’ve got clear on your ideal audience and what makes them tick. Now it’s time to find out where to find them and how they best like to be communicated with. What social media channels do they visit? Do they prefer phone calls or emails?

This will help you to work out the right strategy and messaging to magnetize your customers. Map out the journey that your audience will go on and find out how they are engaging with you now.

9. Review

As technology evolves, it is important to stay abreast of any changes and review your marketing strategies regularly. This will help you to avoid giving stale or out of date messages and keep your creativity flowing. It is important that you don’t just put out the same content and similar messages repeatedly because they have worked in the past.

Regina Wheeler writes at Academic Brits and PhD Kingdom as an e-learning consultant which she learnt when working with numerous projects. Regina loves discussing and writing about management, marketing and finances. Further examples of her work can be found at Dissertation Help