Tips to Define Your Target Audience
Our blog ‘Tips to Define Your Target Audience’ is a business self-help guide to understanding who your target audience are. What they want to see from you and how you can achieve those things. As it is our business Birthday this month – we thought, what better way to celebrate than to help you identify your target audience.
It’s no secret that your audience is what drives your business, so how do you know what they want, to keep them happy? First, let’s take a look at what ‘target audience’ means to your business.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is group of people that you aim your business services and products at. A target audience are used to determine the buyer persona of the business. Some of the demographics include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Employment
- Income
Can I not just aim my business at everyone?
Yes, but you will not receive the desired outcome – not everyone will want to purchase from you. So, why waste valuable marketing budgets on catering to everyone, when you can focus your marketing efforts and budgets to groups of people most likely to purchase from you.
‘If your target audience isn’t listening. It’s not their fault, it’s yours.’ – Seth Godin
So, let’s get down to how you can define your target audience, with our five tips to define your target audience below:
- Really understand your product and services – The starting point to your target audience journey is to understand what your business if offering – you can start by asking yourself the following:
- What is your product or service?
- How will potential customers benefit from it?
- How much will potential customers be willing to pay for it?
- Is there a similar product or service already on the market?
- What makes you stand out from the competition?
- Do you already have existing customers? If so, why do they buy from you?
By answering these questions, you are painting a much clearer picture of your target audience.
2. Find out your target audience pain points – It is important to understand what problems your target audience have so you can provide them with the solutions. We would encourage you to write a list of all the potential people who suffer from the problems that your product or services can solve.
3. Study your competition – You can learn a lot from analysing your competition. In doing so, you can identify the specific areas in which your competitors have not satisfied customers and use this to your advantage. In addition to this, you can also learn where to find your target audience based on what your customers are doing – for example, to which Facebook groups they are pitching.
4. Create your business buyer persona – This involves emotionally connecting with your target audience, which can be done by using data gathered from your market research. There are two aspects of a buyer persona you will need to think about:
5. Demographics – The criteria that you use to identify a group of people. Such as name, marital status, gender, religion, income, occupation, education, and geographical location.
Then there is
6. Psychographics – which can help you to determine the personality of your target audience. This can be trickier to gather and often includes finding out what are your target audiences likes and dislikes, their opinions, people they follow on social media, their lifestyle choices, hobbies, and social behaviours.
Remember you do not need to gather all of the above information to create your customer persona. However, the more information you have the more specific your target audience will be – which will only help when you create marketing campaigns.
7. Evaluation of your target market – once you have narrowed down your target audience you will need to assess it before creating your marketing strategy. Remember that you can have more than one niche – you will just need to refine your marketing campaigns accordingly. It is worth noting that narrowing your target audience too much will mean that your marketing campaign could underperform or just not work. It is all about creating the balance. If this does happen, try widening your target audience.
For more information about target audiences why not check out Forbes article ‘How to Learn More About a Target Audience’ by clicking on the link below:
Do you know your target audience? How did you find out what your target audience was? Perhaps you hired a marketing professional. Did you conducted your own market research – or maybe you did one of the steps mentioned in this blog. We would love to know more about what you think of target audiences, how important you think it is to your business and ways you connect with your target audience. Did our blog Tips to Define Your Target Audience, help you? Let us know in the comments below.
