How to Define Your Audience as an Affiliate

Understanding who your audience is is a key part of having a successful affiliate business.  The more targeted your message is, the more likely it is to convert and drive sales and results. People like getting marketing that feels relevant to them and it gives you a chance to get specific and focused when it comes to your marketing tactics.

Your target audience will drive a number of things: 

–       The type of content you produce across your website, blog, social media, and more

–       The type of brands you choose to partner with and drive sales for an affiliate

–       Which social media networks you use because while we would like our audiences to be everywhere, there’s a high chance they are only in two specific channels. 

When you know who your target audience is, you will be able to find people who are the most likely to buy what you are selling and be able to convince them to do so. 

Steps to Defining Your Target Audience 

While it might seem daunting, it is fairly easy to identify who your target audience is. 

     1. Review your existing audience. 

Who is already engaging with your content? Who currently follows you on social media and what are their interests? Which links are people clicking on the most? 

There are two easy and free tools that you can use to get this data: Google Analytics and social media analytics. Google Analytics will help you identify who is visiting and engaging with your website. It will give you basic demographic breakdowns like age, gender, and location but will also show you which pages people are going to the most frequently and how people are finding your website. 

Social media analytics will give you those same basic demographic breakdowns as well as what content is performing the best and like accounts that your followers also keep up with. Knowing the other things that your audience is interested in will make it easier to pinpoint who your audience is and what they like. 

We recommend building audience profiles off of this information. Chances are you have about three different personas that engage with your content, getting those personas down on paper makes creating your marketing and affiliate strategy much easier. 

     2. What problems do you have a solution to and who faces those problems? 

A lot of people use the internet to solve problems they are facing. As an affiliate marketer, you have the chance to introduce people to products and services that can help solve their problems. Identify your target audience’s main pain points so you can best address them with your content. 

This exercise can also help you hone in even more on your target audience. If you are talking about products and services that address select pain points, you can reverse engineer what your target audience is.

The more you can address your audience’s pain points, the more valuable your recommendations and suggestions become. 

     3. Do Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is a great way to stay on top of your space and come up with new ideas for marketing. Your competitors are also trying to reach the same audience as you so examining who they are targeting gives you more insight into who you should be targeting. 

You do not want to simply copy your competitors, you want your content to stand out from the crowd. You want to have things that are new, different, and better than your competitors.  Pay attention to what your competitors aren’t talking about and start to mix it into your content. 

This will help you fill in the gaps for customers and garner their attention. 

Your target audience is key to being successful in affiliate marketing. Once you find them, everything from the products and services you recommend to the type of content you produce will be influenced. Still have questions? Check out the other blogs on our site to learn how to be an even better affiliate marketer.