What is the target audience for affiliate marketing? Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products online for a revenue share. It’s important for affiliates to specify their target audience because that is the group (or groups) of people who are most likely to convert into paying customers. Not everyone will buy your affiliate product. So sending random website visitors to a website won’t necessarily mean you’ll make sales.
But if you get specific about who you send to your website, you can attract more sales for less.
Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Defining Your Target Audience
Depending on your particular product, you’ll want to attract a certain type of person. For example, DIY enthusiasts might be over a certain age. Of course there’s DIY enthusiasts of all ages, but most of them are likely to fall into a certain age bracket. So by targeting those over the age of, say 30, with your advertising, you’ll attract a larger percentage of buying customers than if you targeted people randomly.
DIY enthusiasts might also be home owners, too. So in your advertising, you can show your adverts to people who fit that criteria. If you own a locally based DIY store, you’ll also want to limit your advertising to people in your local area.
Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of your budget advertising to people who aren’t prepared to travel to visit your shop! Since online advertising is global, you’ll definitely want to limit your advert to a local search if you have a physically based business. Otherwise you’ll spend a tonne of your marketing budget on global traffic who will never convert into customers.
So with this example, you can see how you can define a few criteria for your target audience by:
- Age – over 30’s, for example
- Whether they own a house. or not
- Their location – they must be local
By getting to know your perfect customer better, you can more easily target people like them with your advertising, saving you money and bringing in more paying customers for every dollar/pound you spend.
Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing
For affiliates, the location criteria is not always relevant because affiliates will generally sell world-wide. But with a world wide audience, you can easily spend a lot of money without making a sale; or create a lot of content and spend a lot of time! So it pays to get to know your customer better. If you have existing customers already, look to them for your market research. The more you can learn about them, the easier it is to see patterns emerging which you can use in your advertising and marketing.
Advertising platforms such as Facebook, Adwords and YouTube allow marketers to get super targeted with their advertising. They can specify, to a very minute degree, who they want to show their advertising to. Here’s a few of the criteria you can use in targeting your customer “avatar” – the perfect customer:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Books they like
- Films they like
- What they read
- Who they follow
- Their sex
- Their income
- The websites they visit
- keyword searches
- Videos they are watching
- Topics they are interested in
So if you’re an affiliate for a Yoga course, for example, you can target your advertising towards people who would most likely purchase your course. They might already be searching for the term Yoga, or they might also be looking for diet and exercise programs. It’s also likely they fit into a certain age bracket too.
It can take some time and dedication to learn about your perfect customer “avatar”. You can also start out with broader advertising criteria, and learn from the data you collect. As you learn more, and certain people buy your products, you can get more focused in on the type of people who are most likely to buy.
Speaking To Your Customer Avatar
Many marketers make the mistake of creating a very generic advert and put in in front of everyone. But there’s a saying in marketing “try selling to everyone and you sell to no one”. If your marketing message is very generic, it doesn’t make anyone connect to it, because it doesn’t speak to their needs.
When you understand your perfect customer, and the needs they have, you can talk to those needs in your marketing message. This can be very powerful when put in front of the right people because you’re identifying them more personally and you know what drives them.
So for example, if you’re selling a Yoga course, you might identify a specific need which your course fulfils such as weight loss. By talking to those people who are struggling with weight loss, you are better able to connect their needs and desires with your product – a Yoga course.
Many potential customers might not necessarily be looking for your product, because they might not yet be solution orientated. They might have a strong desire to change though, and have a huge problem. By talking into this problem in your marketing message, you can more easily convey the value of your product to your audience.
If you only talk about your product, for example, this is more of a generic message and it doesn’t connect the problem (pain) with the solution (your product).
Define Your Customer Avatar
So it’s worth spending some time defining your customer avatar if you’re an affiliate. It can save you a heap of time and/or budget in your marketing message. Knowing your perfect customer means you can target them in your advertising, and communicate more personally to them in your marketing.
Without knowing your perfect customer “type”, you’re more likely to spend money on the wrong audience and attract people who aren’t buyers. You can even create a tonne of content which attracts the wrong kind of website visitor, too!
See also how to know your target market and why is target market important.