Knowing where your customers were before they came in contact with your business, online or offline, while valuable, is not as important as knowing them, what they searched on your site and if they managed to find it. Over the last 18 months, business owners and social media strategists have started using social media platforms like Radian6 and Alterian/SM2-Techrigy to find audiences that will engage with your businesses or brands in the way you want them to.

However, the easiest and most inexpensive approach to finding the right audience for your business is locating influential bloggers who will spread the word virally and drive their blogs' audiences to a desired site using free tools like Technorati, a tool that ranks blogs by popularity. In certain cases, the Google search engine can be used to collect lists of subject-relevant bloggers to contact. PR firms such as Abraham Harrison have built lists of several thousand bloggers, by subject and tag, to use for clients' campaigns, and anyone who has the time and inclination can employ the same strategy.

Some applications such as Dan Zarrella's ReTweetability Index use Twitter's interface to pull out the most influential Twitter accounts by keyword and number of re-tweets, who has been re-tweeted the most time and, the links that have been opened and requested the most. These are useful indicators to target specific groups and potential clients.

PR and marketing firms are using Twitter to find the people who are most likely to re-tweet about their clients frequently, offering a Twitter hashtag. For example, when musicians book events, they often look for accounts with 5,000 or more followers in order to invite that whole group to the event. Tweetmeme.com provides a Twitter re-tweet plug-in you can add to Wordpress blogs that encourages viral spreading of posts. In conjunction with targeted blogger outreach, such tools can be effective at driving traffic of the right audiences to your business or brand. The biggest cost is the time spent researching directories and building a local list of bloggers to invite.

An even more targeted approach to finding the right audience for your business comes from a company called Fame Game, which tracked 150,000 of the most influential people and events happening in New York City over the last four years, and which has developed technology to drive targeted audiences to events by mapping and analyzing social connections and media attention.

While finding the means to target the right audience has always been challenging, it's never been easier to create a clientbase/ audience, as long as you're motivated to invest time, track the results, modify your approach and expand your reach. 

Marketeers can obtain quality feedback, that can truly offer the adequate information needed for their strategy restructuring and further targeting of their clientbase.