How Do You Validate Your Target Audience?

Written by Vibha Bharaddwaj

I assume you went through my previous blog and did all that was necessary to identify your audience based on the four key factors –

Demographic
Psychographic
Geographic
Behavioural

And have an idea that your target audience, for example, a profile such as this

Adults in the age group of 25-55, working professionals (employee or business owners), local, extremely health-conscious, like to look good and feel fit and are very technology savvy.

Once you have this information, your next step is to validate this audience for yourself.

How do you go about validating this?

You need to have a strategy.

Here are three key strategies that you can adopt, to validate your audience –

Strategy #1: Start looking for your target audience profile in your known circle of people.

How will you do this? One way is to look for them in your inner circle and the communities that you are a part of.

This is an exercise that you have to do along with your team.

It is more beneficial if you do it along with your team as the number of communities increases and the chances of finding such a customer persona become highly probable.

Here is a tip to find the communities.

The community at work – is one of all your colleagues at your workplace.

Fitness Community – is one of all those people from your fitness group, such as running, biking, swimming etc.

Learning Groups – this is of all those people from your various training programs that you have attended ( outside of work).

Include any other hobby groups that you are a part of.

Friends Group – this is a group of all those friends from childhood to adulthood (including kindergarten to college).

Lastly, your social media group, with all those people from various Social Media(Facebook, LinkedIn et al).

Once you have listed all the people from these groups, match the profile of your target audience with these and see how many matches do you get.

Strategy #2: Build a List of people who match the profile.

Once you have found the matches, start building a list using Microsoft Excel or a CRM tool.

This list should have details such as their name, phone number, email and their profession.

If you have any more information then put them under the “Notes” section so that you can refer when required.

Strategy #3: Engage with people in this list

Decide on how you will engage with people in this list, either email, SMS or telephone.

You may use a combination of these mediums such as first call and then follow-up over email.

When you start engaging with your potential audience, you need to have clarity regarding three things –

What information you will be sharing with them
What will you ask for?
How will you conclude the conversation?

I will cover more about this in my next blog.