7 Steps For Defining Your Ideal Target Audience

B2B events have been noticeably impactful lately.

According to recent research by Bizzabo, a whopping 84% of leadership believes in-person events are essential for company success. And 68% of B2B marketers rely on live events for lead generation.

But to truly capitalize on this potential, you first need to get crystal clear on defining your target audience. Nailing your target audience is how you create an event format that will break through the noise and keep your target buyers' attention.

In this post, we'll explore the following 7 strategies for pinpointing your ideal prospects.

1. Start with the 5Ws of understanding your audience
2. Get into the nitty gritty with technographic and psychographic data
3. Research the pain points your product solves to find your target buyers
4. Use past attendee analysis and leverage pain point marketing using forums
5. Run digital and website analysis with Clearbit
6. Use a multi-channel outbound platform to narrow down on your ICP
7. Undertake a negative analysis

1. Start with the 5Ws of Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your target audience begins with the basic questions. Get into your data to answer the 5Ws:

• Who was your product made for?
• What problem does your product solve?
• Where is your product being used?
• When are your customers looking for your product?
• Why should someone buy your product / Why would they buy a competitor's product?

This information is likely already available in your company mission statement and/or business plan.You can also look at your CRM data to get more information on who's your most engaged audience, what type of content resonates with them, etc.

For instance, you can review the email or ad content that got the most engagement, in terms of subject line, email click-through, ad click-through, and Return on Assets (ROAS) to figure the Who, What, and When.

You can even go one step further and look at the most active and engaged audience (tier 1), the second most active and engaged audience (tier 2), and the less engaged audience (tier 3). Then you can customize your messaging and offers based on what you know about each audience segment.

And don't forget to talk to your sales, customer support, marketing, and product teams. Ask the following questions to get the untold story about your audience:

• Customer support
  • What question comes up the most often from users?
  • What part of our product is most complex for the user to deal with?
• Product
  • What feature of our product is most used by users?
  • What's the most common use case for our product?
  • Who uses our product the most?
• Sales
  • What objections do you hear the most from prospects?
  • What pain points are prospects trying to solve when they come to us?
  • What category of prospect goes on to purchase our product without any need for education from you?
• Marketing
  • What channel is working currently for us and our competitors?
  • Where do our customers come from?
  • What messaging drives conversions the most?

These insights you collect from the answers you get will help you have a good understanding of your audience, and more importantly, what resonates with them and what they expect from your brand.

2. Understand the Details with Technographic and Psychographic Data

Demographic data like age, gender, location, etc. are a good starting point for defining your audience, but they only scratch the surface.

To uncover important, business-driven information about your target customers, you need to dig into technographic, firmographic, and psychographic data. That's where you'll find business data that can truly wow your ideal customers and meet their needs.

According to Hubspot, technographic data focuses on "information that describes the use of technology solutions, their adoption rates, and the potential challenges they present for organizations". Firmographic data is about information like "company size, product offerings, industries served, total revenues, and physical locations". Mailchimp describes psychographic data as "data points describing a [site] visitor's lifestyle, opinions, and values".

Here's an overview of these different data types:

Let's say you're marketing an enterprise accounting software solution. By analyzing the following data points about your ideal customers, you can tailor your messaging and offerings to deliver exceptional value:

• Technographics: You find that your best customers use a combination of QuickBooks, Xero, and cloud storage like Dropbox, and Microsoft Office apps, and require integration with their existing CRM systems. This tells you the technology environment and requirements your software needs to accommodate.
  
  
• Firmographics: Your ideal accounts are mid-market companies in sectors like manufacturing, professional services, SaaS, etc. with revenues between $20-100 million and 200-1000 employees. This shapes your messaging around the scale, compliance, reporting, and forecasting needs of firms in this segment.
  
  
• Psychographics: Research shows your buyers prioritize efficiency, robust security, ease of use, and customer support. They're cost-conscious but willing to pay for quality solutions that drive productivity. This tells you how you can position your software's value proposition and address their motivations.

Using these combined insights, you will be able to:

• Develop content and messaging that speaks directly to the challenges, goals, and technology stacks of your ideal buyer persona.
• Ensure your product demo during the event aligns with the integration needs and experience expectations of your target accounts.
• Reach your audience through the channels and platforms they frequent based on their media preferences.
• Craft case studies, demos, and sales collateral that highlight your solution's quantifiable impact on efficiency, ROI, and the metrics that resonate with your buyers.

3. Research Pain Points Using Social Media and Online Resources

Another important step in identifying your true ICP is understanding their biggest struggles, frustrations, and concerns - their true "pain points." What keeps them up at night? What problems are they grappling with that your product or service could potentially solve? Addressing these core pain points is essential for creating messaging that truly resonates and positions you as the solution they need.

To understand these pain points, monitor the online spaces where your audience spends time, complains, and openly discusses their challenges. Examples of these online spaces are as follows:

1. Online Forums and Communities
2. Social Media
3. User Research Platforms

Online Forums and Communities (Reddit, Quora, niche forums)

People tend to feel comfortable ranting about their issues in these semi-anonymous community spaces. Spend time reading through threads, comments, and discussions to identify common complaints, frustrations, and the specific language your audience uses to describe their struggles.

For instance, let's say you're in the website building space and are building a WordPress competitor. You can head over to Reddit, and then search for "WordPress."

It'll return discussions around WordPress.

Click on the discussion that is most relevant to the pain points your product or service solves. Then select the entire discussion and copy it. Use ChatGPT or any AI tool to dissect and analyze the entire conversation.

In the following example, I asked the AI to analyze the conversation and tell me the top 10 pain points WordPress users are struggling with. You can even ask more questions about the gender, profession, if any, and other information people shared about themselves in the discussion.

Social Media

Both X and LinkedIn have search functions that let you explore conversations happening around specific keywords and topics relevant to your audience. Use these to surf through posts, threads, and dialogues where pain points are being discussed organically.

For instance, on X, I searched for WordPress, and scrolled through the results to see this:

The process here is the same: Skim through the comments and analyze the sentiment about WordPress. This is like a user interview, but at scale.

User Research Platforms

Doing the research on your own might feel like a tedious task for you. In this case, Wynter is the perfect solution.

Wynter helps you find lookalike audiences to your ideal customer profile so you can survey them and find what messaging or offer would work best with your ICP. This helps you uncover insights about your audience you've never thought of.

4. Analyze Past Event Data to Refine Your Target Audience

Past attendee analysis is all about working with the demographics and behavioral data you have about past event attendees. Here, you want to focus your analysis more on what brought attendees to your previous events. Consider things like your conversion rate of attendees and which cities produced the most registrations.

Look into your attribution software to see what channels registrants came from. You can also check:

• Which topics attracted the most interest? These likely point to key audience challenges.
• What did attendees say they valued or wished for more of? Gaps to fill.
• Which geographic regions had the highest registration? Prioritize those audiences.

Also, remember to consider your competitor's events and what has brought them success. See what they did and how the audience reacted to it, so you can avoid mistakes and bring something new to the table.

Note: Run an event that isn't terrible with the event planning workbook.

5. Run Digital and Website Analysis with Clearbit

Most attribution software is not very accurate, so it's hard to know exactly where your customers came from. But with tools like Clearbit, it's possible to identify companies that visit your website.

When you create an account and connect their code snippet, every 7 days, they'll send you a report of people who visited your website, what pages they visited, and how long they stayed. And, you can filter the results by channel.

Most importantly, you can get granular data on each of these companies, like their address, industry, revenue, company size, and contact data.

Look at the data as a whole and categorize the companies based on size, revenue, industry, geography, and business model. This will give you an idea of what types of companies are most interested in your product and services, but more importantly, you can use that to build lookalike audiences with precision.

Another thing you can do is to use the Target Markets feature of Clearbit. It allows you to set and define the ideal target audience of your company.

You can push this data to your CRM or cross-check the data with the visitors who visit your website. This will give you a clear idea of the proportion of your current traffic that matches your ICP. Based on that, you can decide to craft a messaging that's more on-point and targeted towards your ICP.

6. Use a Multi-Channel Outbound Platform to Narrow Down on Your ICP

Most companies, especially smaller ones, know exactly who their target audience should be. What's hard for them is attracting them to events. Reach by Banzai is the ideal platform for this use case. It deploys multi-channel outbound campaigns directly to your ICP and drives action on your event invites, content offers, survey questions - you name it.

The way Reach works is simple.

1. Set your campaign name and choose a campaign type from the 14 available options. Specify your desired outbound campaign goal - event registrations, content downloads, survey responses, etc.

2. Set your event details like a registration URL, start date, end date, and campaign goal.

3. You add the different criteria that define your ideal target audience. Reach lets you target depending on demographics, technographics, firmographics, and more. Be as granular as possible.

4. Add a contacts list, exclusion list, and additional supporting notes.

5. Reach will find the decision makers you want from their 200+ million database. And run the outreach so you focus on the most important things.

7. Undertake a Negative Analysis

Negative analysis may not be on your radar currently, but it's well worth attending to. You've done your analysis and you've seen what works-now you need to fix what isn't working. Ask yourself, what converted your leads into customers?

Look into what content isn't performing, which email chains have low open and click-through rates, and which events have low registration and attendance rates. This enables you to make a list of 'What Not to Do' for your future events to better attract attendees and convert them into customers.

Events make an impact! For yours to stand out, it needs to cut through the noise. Crafting an event that captures attention and further conversations begins with a firm understanding of your target audience and their attendee profile.

Engage the audience you want by analyzing the audience you have. Learn the insights you need to create tailored, memorable events.

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