How to Find Your Target Audience: A Simple Guide for Small Businesses

If you’re running a small business, you’ve probably been told you need to ‘find your target audience’, ‘define your target audience’, or some other variation.

But most founders skip this step (are you one of them?). They jump into posting on social media, running ads, or building a lovely new website without ever working out who they’re trying to reach.

And unfortunately, when you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one.

This guide will show you:

• Why defining your target audience is crucial
• What happens if you don’t have a clear target audience
• Practical, step-by-step ways on how to find your target audience

By the end, you’ll understand exactly what you need to do and the steps on how to find your target audience with confidence. And if you don’t, or you don’t have the time to put in the legwork, perhaps we can help. Let’s have a chat.

Before we get into it, let’s first explore why you need a target audience, and what happens if you don’t have one.

What is a target audience (and why do you need one)?

A target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy from you. Understanding how to find your target audience is about identifying these people clearly and specifically. Your target audience are the people that your product or service was built for, and whose problems your product or services solve. And you need to be specific as to who these people are so that you can market to them. 

As the old saying goes ‘when you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one’.

For example:

❌ Targeting ‘anyone who owns a business’ is too broad.

✅ Targeting “small business owners in Coventry and Birmingham who are ready to grow but don’t have in-house marketing” is precise, and very powerful.

But why do you, as a business owner, need to be clear on your target audience? 

• You need to be clear so you know exactly who you’re speaking to so you can market to them effectively.
• You can be more efficient with your resources – stopping spending time and money on people who’ll never buy from you.
• Your message will work better because the audience feels like you’re talking to them, solving their specific problems. It resonates with them.
• You build a loyal customer base who want to work with you again and again because they feel like you understand them.

What happens if you don’t define your audience?

Skipping this step leads to the same pain points we see again and again in SMEs:

• Marketing feels scattered or reactive with lots of disjointed activity. It can often feel like ‘marketing doesn’t work’.
• You attract the wrong clients – the ones that drain energy or aren’t aligned with your offering.
• Content doesn’t perform because it’s too broad or generic.
• Sales slow down. You rely on referrals or luck, not a repeatable system. Referrals are great, but we all know that they slow down over time – definitely not reliable for sustainable growth.
  

The bottom line is that without knowing how to find your target audience, your marketing will feel messy, and a likely outcome of that is that you’ll be trying to ‘be everywhere’ i.e. on all the social media channels, trying all the tactics ‘to see what works’. But the reality is you don’t need to be everywhere, you just need to be where your target audience are.

A helpful way to ‘trim the fat’ off of your marketing approach is, once you’ve defined your target audience, to audit your marketing efforts and to listen to what the data is telling you. There is a free guide on how to do your own marketing audit here.

How to find your target audience in 5 steps

This is the framework we follow when identifying a target audience for our clients – use this to help you find yours!

1. Start with your best customers

Look at your existing clients or buyers. Who are your favourite ones – the ones that bring the most value and least hassle? This is the starting point in learning how to find your target audience.

• What industry are they in?
• What size is their business?
• What problems do they come to you with (that you solve)?

Clue: Your ideal future audience often looks a lot like your best past customers. 

2. Define their key problem

People don’t buy products or services – they buy solutions to problems. This is an important point to remember throughout your marketing development.

• What’s frustrating them right now?
• What’s holding their business back?
• What are they losing (time, money, growth) by not solving it?

If you can describe their problem better than they can, you’ll build trust easily. 

3. Build a simple target audience

Big marketing agencies will create huge 10-page persona documents with imaginary names and favourite coffee orders. But if you’re an SME, start by keeping it simple. You can always build out personas later. 

FYI – A target audience is a definitive group of people that your business can help. It’s both broad and specific – a great place to start. A persona is a level deeper, creating a ‘person’ that represents a group of people. Personas are very specific – for example ‘Alison is a 35 year old Lawyer who has 2 kids, is divorced, and likes to do a parkrun on a Saturday. Her challenges are xyz…’ And on and on. Personas are great, and they can be much simpler than a 10-pager. 

By keeping it simple for your target audience, let’s identify: 

• Who are they? (role, company type, sector)
• What do they need? (the outcome they want most)
• Where do they spend their time? (LinkedIn, networking events, industry forums)
• Why would they choose you? (what makes you the right solution)

This doesn’t need to be perfect – it’s a working draft you’ll refine during the next step.

4. Don’t assume – back it up

Too many businesses assume they know their customers. But if you want to find your target audience, you need to back it up with conversations and feedback. The mistake of assuming you have all the answers can cost you dearly because you (as the business owner) can miss out on lots of insight. What you think is your clients or customers’ challenges may be way off. So if there is one thing to take from this guide – it’s to talk to your customers and potential customers. Not only will you get insight that you might not have otherwise gotten, it also shows those customers or potential customers that you care about what they think.

Some ways to do this:

• Run polls on LinkedIn.
• Look at competitor reviews – what are people praising or complaining about?
• Top way: ask your network or existing customers for feedback – even conduct mini interviews. Some questions we’d recommend asking:
  • What made you choose us over other options?
    Reveals your differentiator in the eyes of your audience.
  • What problem were you trying to solve when you found our company?
    Highlights the pain points you should centre your marketing on.
  • What result or benefit have you valued most since working with us?
    Shows the outcomes that resonate and drive loyalty.
  • Where do you usually go to look for solutions like ours?
    Tells you where your audience is spending their time – use this to decide which channels and tactics to use.
  • Would you change anything about working with us? What would it be?
    Helps you see any gaps you can address upfront in your messaging.

Another great thing to do (which can seem uncomfortable), is to try to talk to people who didn’t become a customer. Perhaps they went to a competitor – can you get hold of them to have an open discussion about why they chose the competitor over you? This can help you see more blind spots.

Real words from real people are far more valuable than the perception of those within the business – you may simply be too close to it.

5. Align Your Marketing Around Them

Once you’ve defined your audience, connect the dots and bring it all together. Take a look at:

• Messaging – Does your website headline speak to their problem, and position you as the obvious solution?
• Content – Are your marketing channels (social media, emails, etc) solving the challenges they care about?
• Channels – Are you showing up where they spend their time? Remember, you may be wasting time and money trying to be visible in places where your target audience isn’t. 

This is where marketing starts being more strategic (exciting!). 

Quick DIY exercise

Take 10 minutes and write down:

1. Three of your best past clients
2. Their biggest challenges
3. What result they wanted most
4. Where you connected with them (LinkedIn, referral, email, etc.)

This simple list is often enough to spot patterns, and those patterns are the building blocks of how to find your target audience. Just don’t forget to back it all up with research.

Document it

When you’ve put in all the hard work to identify your target audience – make sure you write it down and make it accessible to the whole team. This might be on a Notion board (we love Notion), on a Google Drive or on a One Drive. Somewhere where you can always relate back to it. Because understanding your target audience will help everyone in the business understand who they are.

Remember, identifying your audience isn’t something you can do and forget about, it’s a valuable piece of work that you need to come back to again and again.

When you know who you’re speaking to, your marketing stops being so difficult. It becomes easier as you can put yourself into the shoes of who the target audience is, and base your marketing around them, and make it for them.

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