No matter how brilliant your business idea is, you can’t serve everyone. Hence, you need to know your target audience. Even if everyone on earth uses the product you offer, you must learn to identify those that’ll pay.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that many global brands have Instagram accounts for each country their business is present. Of course, you could argue that having a central account is good enough. However, to effectively target specific audiences, these companies segment their social presence.
Global businesses understand how the concept of a target audience can make or break a brand. Yet, according to a Marketing Evolution White Paper, $37 billion is wasted on target-less advertising yearly.
Interestingly, as important as identifying the target audience is for a business, many fail to execute the process accurately. Hence, this article helps you understand the target audience, the importance, and how to find yours.
UNDERSTANDING WHAT TARGET AUDIENCE MEANS
Fundamentally, your business’s target audience is a group of people who want or need your product. Therefore, these are the people that should be seeing your ads. Several factors are responsible for what qualifies an audience to be your target; age, income, interests, etc. If you’ve ever run a Facebook ad, you must be familiar with the audience optimization stage.
The various factors characterizing the target audience are markers of behavior and demographics. As essential as the target audience’s details seem, they should premise your marketing strategies. These target audience details should help you find answers to the following;
- Where should you spend your ad money?
- How should you approach and appeal to potential customers?
- What product should you build next?
- How do they make purchase decisions?
- How do they relate to products like mine?
It’s vital to have answers to these questions and more before spending a dollar on advertising.
While these details reveal the size of your target audience, they also show the value. For instance, your target audience may be the top 1% of the society who are ready to pay thousands of dollars for your product.
I like Vans – the shoe company – you offer products meant for different audiences, ensuring that your segmentation is perfect. Carefully identify the audience of each product and market accordingly.
Related Reading: Market Segmentation
WHY YOU SHOULD FIND YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
There are several reasons you must identify your target audience, especially as a smaller business. Some of these are;
It’s Cheaper to Know Your Target Audience
It’s exciting to have your advert on billboards or at the super bowl. However, these are expensive. Doing this is just like spreading the word about your business and hoping that the right people find them. However, when you invest in finding the right target audience, it saves you money. Upon finding your target audience, you know where they are and device how to reach them cheaply.
Targeting your audience may mean fewer people see your business. However, the few people are certainly the right people willing to pay.
Better Communication and Engagement
When you don’t know your audience, it becomes harder to communicate what you’re offering. You should identify your target audience to understand if some vocabularies resonate with them. It would be best if you learned how they communicate and tailor your brand voice to that.
It’s essential to develop your brand communication strategy to communicate your audience’s interests. But, first, you have to show potential customers the value of your product or service. You can’t show them if you don’t know them.
Branding
Identifying your target audience helps inform the branding for your business. Knowing what your audience is interested in and what they are doing gives your business a direction. As a business owner, your company should be directed toward being more personal to the consumer. Your customers need to feel an emotional connection to your brand. Survey claims that 80% of consumers do business with a brand that feels personal.
TYPES OF TARGET AUDIENCE
Customers are people. Even if you run a B2B company, your target audience companies are run by people. Now, ‘types of target audience’ doesn’t mean types of people to target. Here, we are referring to how you define the people you’re campaigning to. Hence, the type of target audience refers to the various categories you can segment people into. Here are the three main types of target audience:
Subculture
Subculture means that the people in the grouping have similar experiences. The experience, in this case, could refer to a specific music genre or entertainment. It’s common for people to define themselves by subcultures. Therefore, your company can use the insight to reach out to those likely to pay.
When you identify the subculture you’re targeting, you think of how they relate to or use your product. This means that different people can relate to the same product differently. Hence, maximizing subcultures is vital in this case.
Purchase Intention
Purchase intention refers to the segmentation done for people who already plan to buy. Hence, marketing isn’t about introducing the product to them. It’s more about giving them the additional information they need to complete the purchase process.
For instance, someone may already know they need to buy a laptop. But, as a vendor, your job at that point shouldn’t be telling them to buy a laptop. Instead, it would help focus on marketing the laptop’s specs to you and why it’s the best for them.
Interests
The ‘interest’ segment involves understanding what people do—for example, their hobbies, aspirations, etc. Then, when you know what already interests your audience, you’ll figure out how to better connect with them.
The interests direct your marketing in a direction that irks your buyer’s motivation and behavior. The greatest thing you can achieve with your marketing is to appeal to your audience’s emotions. Identifying interests makes that possible.
Related Reading; How to create a B2B Marketing Strategy
HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Identifying your target audience is such an essential aspect of business and marketing. Thankfully, there are numerous resources and infrastructure to help you find your target audience.
Know Your Current Customers
The very first thing to do in identifying your target audience is to look inwards. Look at your current customer base. Who are they? Who do they buy? Which category of people accounts for your highest sales?
When you have answers to these, you’re on the path to finding the class of people your business serves. Then, all you’ll have to do is to find more of those people.
Analyze Your Competition
In business, it’s normal to analyze what your competition is doing. While you won’t spend all your time on competition analysis, it’ll help you figure what they are doing wrong or right. So don’t try to follow your competition’s lead anyways; create a niche for yourself.
Related Reading; How to Spy on your Competitors
Conduct Market Research
Researching your market is essential whether you run a new business or an old one—the market changes per time. Hence, know what the market is saying; check if your product is relevant and to whom.
Create a User Persona
Come up with a fictitious profile of who your ideal customer is. The user personas give direction to your value proposition. With the user persona, you’re covering your potential customer’s basic demographic details, needs, and personality.
However, you shouldn’t just create personas out of thin air. Your fictitious profile should be backed by data, surveys, social media insights, Google analytics, etc.
Furthermore, you can define more streamlined for the audience you see potential in. You can choose specific demographics to target. You can also pivot your product and service offering to fit another audience.
Leverage Analytics Tools and Vendors
There are numerous analytics tools out there. These tools track and provide insights into your audience, how they engage with and use your products, what’s making them leave, etc. Examples of analytics tools are; Google Analytics, Facebook insights, website performance dashboard, etc.
Also, as a B2B marketer, you should know what alternative data is, where to get them and how to leverage them for business growth. Alternative data provides easy insight into potential customers at a price.
CONCLUSION
Identifying your target audience is a great way to grow your business. However, you shouldn’t forget that there may be opportunities in other areas.