Even if you don’t have a clue about a specific audience, it is not too hard to gain insight about your target audience in a very short amount of time.

Here we will be discussing 3 ways you can gain massive insight about an audience so you can fairly quickly learn who they are, what they want, and what they need.

Knowing and understanding your audience makes it easier to build a relationship with them and ultimately, get them to spend money with you. It’s hard to fake this stuff. Either you understand them or you don’t and they will be able to see that very quickly in the words you use in your ads and in your content. This works for anything you are trying to sell. If you are trying to sell ballroom dance lessons, you need to know who is more likely to need your lessons. Are they women or men and how old? Are they parents, are they single, are they engaged to be married? There are so many little things to consider when you understand your target audience. Sure you can start broad, but to get the best targeted audience to click your ads and sign up for whatever it is you are selling, then you will get much better results the more you hone into who you audience actually is.

This is so crucial to your paid advertising success.

Find Your Niche Celebrities

Before we get into the 3 little known ways to get to know your target audience better, let’s first discuss the ideas of finding celebrities of niches. Finding the celebrities of our niche will will help us with our research moving forward.

Since the US Open is going on right now, let’s use Tennis as an example throughout. So let’s say we are trying either sell Tennis equipment, or other physical products in the Tennis niche.

What we are going to want to do first is make a list of the celebrities or the people who are well known in the tennis industry.

You might know some famous tennis players or you can do a simple google search for terms like “famous tennis players”. Make a list of the top 10 to 15 players. You can do this in any niche and anything you are trying to promote. For instance, if you were trying to promote a book, you would want to research the top 10 – 15 best selling authors in that particular niche.

Go ahead an open up a google spreadsheet or a regular spreadsheet and write these names down.

Hint: Sometimes picking the “biggest names” in a niche is not the best strategy in some cases. For instance, choosing people who like Roger Federer might not be the best indicator of the tennis niche because he is very widely known. You might have people liking Roger because he is a really great player and he is very good looking (well, some might think so anyway). But you see, the more obscure but still famous you get with the celebrities, the more you will find the dedicated fans. Keep that in mind!

When we are doing our research, instead of doing a general search for the interest of “tennis”, once we know the celebrities in our niche then we can really target people who, in this case, really know and love tennis because they are following their favorite players. This strategy works the best on Facebook as we will soon see.

Along the same lines with finding celebrities, we also want to find different organizations and other interests that our target audience would be involved in and we can find these in an efficient way, as we will also see in a little bit.

Ok, so hopefully you are getting the point where instead of just using general keywords, we are using a round about way of finding people who are interested in tennis.

Now, let’s bring this information over to 3 different strategies to really zone in on who we want to target in our ads.

1) Facebook Insights

Believe it or not, Facebook itself can give you a ton of information about your target audience.

Here’s what you need to do:

1- Go to Facebook and Click Home and then Ads Manager

2- Then click on Audience Insights

3 – Type in your interests and see results.

Start documenting your findings. Notice the Age and Gender. Notice that the majority of people who like Roger Federer are men and women (more men at 48%) between the ages of 18 and 24.

You will want to plug the top 10-15 celebrities and compare the results to get some concrete results.

Go through the demographics page and notice the other categories to gain more insight about your audience such as Lifestyle, Relationship Status, Education Level and Job Title. By looking at this information you will develop a better understanding as well as learn what your audience can afford by looking at this information.

Now, remember above where I said you can find other interests similar to celebrity status? Here’s what we are going to do.

4 – Click on Pages (right next to demographics in the image example above).

These results are going to open your mind as to what other search terms and interests you can be targeting besides the general term “tennis” and besides the celebrities.

These are going to be other terms you are going to want to plug into your audience insights to do research about AND items that you can plug right into your ads themselves.

Notice the “More Page Likes” Facebook gives us:

This is amazing information that Facebook gives us absolutely for free! Isn’t this exciting? There is tons of information we can learn from audience insights.

Notice the other areas you can explore and also take note that Facebook lets you save your searches and access them at a later time.

Let’s get to our next little known tool that not many marketers use for research about target audience.

2) Media Kits

Discovering media kits will be a powerful tool in your arsenal. Why? Because magazines and publications spend a crap load of money to find out information about their target audience. These magazines have done a lot of the research and it is often the same research that we need about our target audience to gain more insight about them.

A great place to start if you are not sure what kind of magazines and publications your audience reads is http://justmediakits.com.

Basically, this site is designed to provide you with media kits for various different magazines and publications. It’s really got information about every relevant niche on this planet.

Here are just a few:

For a full list you can check out the site here.

What you are going to want to do is this:

1- Find your niche:

 

2 –  Notice the results that you receive. In our case, they only have one magazine for tennis.

Here’s the free information that the site gives us (paying a fee to the site will give you the actual media kits for the magazines and publications but there are ways to get that information with a little bit of leg work).

Hint – once you learn how to do this research, you can train someone else to do this research for you.

Notice the checks on the image above. This is what we want to pay attention to.

Sometimes if we go directly to the website, we can find the media kit and information about the magazine’s target audience. What you want to do is go to the website and scroll all the way to the bottom and find links that either say “advertising” or “media kit”. Sometimes we will find a wealth of information and sometimes it will come out short, like what I am finding on the tennis magazine. I am not really getting the information I need, BUT there are a few things I can do.

1) First, I can google more tennis magazines (and even more niche celebrity websites) and go through the same process to find the media kit and advertising information.

2) As we can see here with our tennis example, they are leading us right to a person to actual contact….with a phone number!!

Here’s another one:

You can’t be afraid to pick up the phone to try to extract information from the folks listed on the websites! Your goal is to find out information about the audience these magazines cater to. If you need to fib a little bit and express some interest in advertising to get information, then do that. Obviously, you don’t want to abuse this and keep the person on the phone for hours and hours getting them information, but if you ask them a few questions that will be fine. Use this strategy wisely and don’t abuse it.

Most of the time for larger publications, you will get a wealth of information about the target audience. For example, here is what the Wall Street Journal has to offer:

So it’s really going to depend on what you are researching. You might have to take additional steps to get the information you are looking for if you are not just given it by the media kits a site has to offer you.

There are also other sources of audience demographic research like http://alexa.com and http://similarweb.com. With these sites, to get maximum information about your niche, there is a fee associated, but oftentimes it is well worth it to gain as much insight as you can.

3) Observe Your Competitors

Now that you know how to get the information about who your audience is, what they are reading and where they are “hanging out” online, you can start to make observations about what other advertisers are doing to get the attention of your target audience.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to advertising and the offers you provide to the niche you are going after.

What you want to do is see what your competitors are doing. How and what are they advertising? Who are they advertising to? What are they saying? These are all questions you should be getting answers to.

You can start by going to Facebook and doing a graph search like this one:

This is a great place to start because now we can find other similar pages to what we are marketing and we can take a peak inside to see what is already working.

What you are going to want to do is look at the posts that are getting shares, comments and likes.

Take a look at this:

This is a post that is selling something. 17.074 likes. 94 Shares. 805 Comments. Who are they advertising to on this page?

Check this one out:

Holy smokes! A notebook with the initials RF! Wow.

Take note of the free information and entertainment posts so that you can also get an idea of what the audience is interested in. This will also help you connect with them deeper and they are more likely to stick and perhaps buy from you later on.

So these are the things you need to keep your eyes open about. You will know and understand how to communicate with your audience just by observing Facebook groups, websites, blogs, and other communities like Google Plus and Pinterest pages. You will get a wealth of information just by taking the time to do the proper research!

So there you have it. These are the 3 ways to learn a heck of a lot about your target audience. It does not take very long and there are ways that you can also pay for this information (or hire someone else to do it) without having to do it all yourself.  I do recommend that if you are getting into a niche that you learn and find out as much about your target audience as possible. You will do a lot better and appeal to your market in the long run.

If you could think of other ways that you learn about your target market, please comment below. We would love to hear from you!