Attracting customers is crucial to a start-up or currently operational business. You can’t please and reach everyone even if you apply the best marketing strategies there are. Besides, no business can afford to target everyone.
According to a study, not everyone who visits your business website will resonate with the message. So, how do you ensure your message reaches the right people at the right time? Identify your target audience.
With your target audience, you’ll be talking directly to your kind of people. Sounds refreshing, right? In this guide, you’ll find all the information and the steps to help you reach your target audience.
Read to the end!
What Is a Target Audience?
This is a distinct subset of people you want to attract with your strategic marketing. Your target audience sets itself apart as people interested in your goods and services. In simple terms, they are people who should be easier to convert to paying clients.
In identifying your target audience, you can easily route your marketing plan to enhance your business development process. It would help to research your target audience before launching your product or service. This way, it’s effortless to establish who, what and how about your ideal customer guaranteeing long-term success.
But, target audiences are different. They have specific interests, habits and characteristics to which you should direct your marketing message. Common target audience traits include age, gender, location, education level, and what they earn.
How to Identify Your Target Audience?
What’s the process of identifying your target audience? How can you tell who’s likely to buy?
Here are several steps to help you identify your ideal audience that will likely boost your sales.
1. Do Industry Research
The purpose of doing industry research is to help launch strategic marketing for your target audience. But you can only do this with your specific audience.
Preferably, statistics and special reports help make your efforts to reach your target audience easier. Statistics are facts about your industry. You have to use numerical data to determine how many people are in your specific target market and who are likely to buy your products and services.
Accurate statistics are enough to prove that your business is going to work. They help in knowing about your ROI, content marketing, blogging, social media and mobile marketing, among others. This way, you’ll know the type and purpose of an approach suitable for your ideal target audience.
Researching special reports also helps to describe your customer’s age, sex and item preferences. You can find statistics and special reports on the internet from terms like “market size for [your product or service]”.
2. Profile Current Customers
The easiest way of knowing your target audience is by observing from the inside. Talk to your current customers and find out common traits. Your loyal customers will help you understand the people you should target with your products.
Ideally, ask for feedback from your clients after a purchase. You can use a questionnaire or a survey to get reviews on your products and the customer experience. Reviews also help in building a solid word-of-mouth marketing campaign.
3. Choose a Relatable Target Audience
You don’t have to struggle to be best friends with your customers. However, it would be best to identify an audience you can easily relate to. Your customers’ intentions and goals should align with yours to strike an emotional and natural connection. Consequently, your content and marketing campaigns rely on brand affinity.
Here, the secret is to ensure you are running a business that you’re passionate about. Hence, finding an audience that naturally connects with your products and services becomes easy.
4. Check Out the Competition
Believe it or not, your competition is a sure way of leading you to your target audience. Most businesses discover valuable details about their target audience by looking at their competition. Visit your competitor’s website and social media platforms.
Another way of analyzing your competition is by identifying the customers’ pain points. Once you see what they’re complaining about from your competition, you’ll easily target your business to provide solutions. Address your solutions better than your competition to attract the audience your way.
Get a profound feel of your competitor’s target audience and see whether they also fit in your business. This way, it’ll be easier to boost your sales potential and stand out from the crowd.
5. Consider the Long-Term Potential
When you focus on the search for the ideal target audience, you can easily get caught up in the wrong things. Initially, you’ll put extra effort into finding customers who want to buy your products and services. Though this is the goal, it can sometimes lead you astray.
Eventually, it would help if you prioritized identifying a target audience that will buy your products and help you build your business. How do you achieve that?
Search for audience demographics that will become loyal and repeat customers. Establish ways to support your target audience and make them brand ambassadors for long-term business growth.
6. Use Tools
In this digital transformation era, there are several tools to help you in your strategic marketing. Tools like Google Analytics provide exhaustive details on who is viewing your website, where they are from, and what they want.
Most importantly, these tools help you know the people taking longer on your website and social platforms. This way, you’ll know what your audience likes better and why others don’t spend time on your website.
This will help you optimize your website for customers to enjoy and have an excellent experience and design targeted marketing campaigns. With valuable data from Analytics, social media advertising, keyword tools, and SEO statistics, your message will fall on the right ears at the right time.
Type of Target Audience
When identifying your target audience, you must figure out the specifics. Separate one customer from another. The best approach is to create a user persona that defines your audience.
Types of target audiences include:
- An Age-Based Target Audience
People can act differently because of the age difference. Sometimes, the person likely to buy your product is not always the one you’re targeting.
For example, if you’re analyzing the target market for baby products, your target audience is parents, not newborns or toddlers. For the times when you don’t have a definite age range for your customers, it’s best to narrow your target market.
For instance, a business that sells enterprise-level software would benefit from researching the likely ages of CEOs in a particular industry. This will help you use strategic marketing for a suitable age range.
- A Geographical or “Local” Target Audience
Only a few renowned brands can target customers globally. Reaching such a broad scope is complex and may limit you from delivering your services and goods to each country.
Unless your services are digital, consider practical ways of connecting locally with new customers. How far can you travel to provide services, and what’s the longest distance for shipping your products?
- A Personality-Driven Target Audience
Personality is a must-have component in all your campaigns. In your search for your ideal target audience, you should also consider what’s valuable to your customer and what isn’t.
What do your customers do in their free time? What do they care about? For example, showing your ethical side would be ideal if you want to connect more with a millennial audience interested in social responsibility.
Importance of a Target Audience
Why do you need a target audience for your business? Knowing what impact a particular audience plays in your business development is crucial.
Here are some benefits of a defined target audience;
- Efficient Budget Use
Not identifying your target audience is expensive, literally. Digital marketing strategies like ads and content marketing require money for sustenance. And this is a waste of these strategies to reach an audience that has no interest in your products or services.
But thanks to clever, targeted marketing, you can make better ROI. Your target audience helps you narrow your approach and spend less in sending your brand message to the few who want a lot to do with your business.
- Identify an Under-served Market
If you don’t want stiff competition, identify an underserved market and its audience. Instead of reaching everyone interested in your products, focus your marketing plan on meeting the needs of a smaller group.
For example, you could be selling skin products every woman needs, but prioritizing the needs of elderly skin carves out a productive niche for your product. Even though the target audience for the under-served market is small, you’re likely to serve it better than how you sold all products.
- Build Stronger Customer Relationships
Targeted marketing allows you to reach the right audience that reacts positively to your marketing strategies. In-depth research on your target audience helps you to find customer problems and resolutions. This way, customers feel cared for and listened to, increasing their chances of interacting with your business.
A better approach would be using personalized content, which will set you apart from your competitors. For instance, you can use a personalized email with similar goods to what a customer bought. This way, you’ll reach out personally to ensure your brand establishes stronger and better customer relationships.
Parting Shot
Identifying and learning more about your target audience guarantees your brand survival in the highly competitive market. A strategic marketing campaign would save you a lot in a world where your customers expect unique and satisfying experiences from their best brands.
You must know your target audience’s needs, wants, and expectations as a business. Today, customers are no longer passive but actively interact with a brand in several ways. This helps them decide what, when and how they want the product and services.