When you’re running a small business, taking time out of your already-packed day to identify your target market is probably the last thing on your mind. It may even feel like an extraneous step when you’re creating a marketing plan. After all, you know your customers like your product or service. But that knowledge isn’t enough.
When you precisely identify your target customer, you’ll be able to tailor your marketing efforts, products and services to speak directly to him/her. That way, you can build a loyal customer base that drives repeat sales.
Remember, your target customer doesn’t have to be an existing customer. In fact, they don’t even have to be aware that your business exists — yet. By having a clear picture of who your target market is, you’ll be able to create marketing plans that resonate with those qualified buyers and converts them to paying customers.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is the demographic of people most likely to be interested in your product or service.
An intimate part of a business plan is having a clear understanding of this perfect client. That is, you can comfortably demonstrate the who, what, why, where, when and of your product or service.
Essentially, you can pinpoint:
- What features your business, product or service offer
- How those features are different from everyone else’s
- What are the benefits of those features or what problem they are linked to address
- How those benefits matter or help solve a customer’s problem
- Who is likely to buy from you for the above benefits. Be sure to include their age, financial status, marital status, education level, employment status, and so on
If you own an hvac company, your target audience begins with property owners, both commercial and residential.
If you own a toy store, your target audience starts with parents, grandparents, and anyone else with children in their lives.
Hence, marketing without first defining your market segment is a lot like driving without directions. You spend a lot of time, fuel dollars and effort making the wrong turns.
Why define my target audience?
Since it’s impossible to reach everyone at once, narrowing your focus to a core audience helps you to develop an effective marketing strategy. It helps your company craft a messaging strategy that appeals directly to the type of consumers who are more likely to convert into customers.
For example, Facebook Ads allow you to target users according to their interests.
It is also more cost-effective to refine your audience, because your campaigns are run on a smaller, more focused scale.
If you’re a residential painter but you only want to paint luxury homes or high dollar homes, focusing your marketing to homeowners that live in areas with luxury homes is more beneficial than trying to advertise to every single homeowner in your region.
In order for people to “buy into” a product or service, they need to relate to the tone and content of the message. By striking a chord with someone, a personal connection is made, and trust is established
How To Define My Target Audience
As we discussed, defining this audience is paramount to your marketing success. So, let’s go over a few questions that you’ll need to answer, which will help you to create a buyer persona:
Who did you have in mind when you thought about making or selling your product or service?
Before making a decision of going into a particular business, one must have thought about different aspects of it, including things like supply and demand and potential competition.
The target market is one of the first things to think of in such situations.
What do they need and how can you offer that to them?
Sometimes it is more important to understand your target frustrations and needs than to have a great and catchy viral video with your product in it.
However, you have to be really clever about using it. Mostly it depends on your experience.
Think about what is it that you can help them with, and is what you offer better than other solutions?
Where do they get their information?
I don’t mean just the news. I mean any information. If they use Facebook, that is information.
So, what social networks does your target audience use?
Which websites do they visit?
Which magazines do they read?
Do they like watching the Vampire Diaries or are they into True Detective?
This is important because media, including social media, is the best way of interacting with your target audience.
What Are Your Potential Customers’ Pain-Points?
A mistake many businesses make is to assume buyers care much about their brand. Contrary, buyers really care about what you can help them solve.
You make a mistake every time you talk about yourself instead of addressing what you are doing to elevate the suffering of your customer.
And you need to research what exactly your clients love about your product or service. Many times, it might not be what it seems.
A good example:
Popular thinking attributes Apple’s massive success to producing superior hardware and software. But experts know better.
Apple’s diehard flock, ultimately, desires and values the emotional fulfillment an Apple device gives them. This includes perceived quality, superior technology, and the feeling of being a part of an advanced movement/society.
Clever and effective marketing, backed by a crisp understanding of their customer, helps Apple to make buyers feel a part of a special, privileged group.
The emotional connection brewed helps the Silicon Valley giant to steer clear of the competition. They end up selling dozens of millions of devices in mature smartphone markets than any other smartphone maker.
What is it that makes them spend money?
This is a tricky one. You need to think about how your product or service integrates with what your target group is willing and has the possibility to spend money on.
What will it take to make the purchase?
Are those emotions, necessity, desire for adventure or feeling beautiful? Or is it something else? Whatever it is, your product needs to be aligned with their trigger.
If you are advertising roofing services, target those homeowners that will eventually need to fix or repair their roofs.
Or if you are offering Managed IT services, remind people that they need to keep their business and private affairs secure and that your IT service solves that concern.
Need More Reasons?
When marketers discuss “segmentation,” they’re more often than not referring to demographic segmentation. Demographic segmentation is a hallmark of marketing campaign strategy, honing in on characteristics such as age, gender, location, income level, and marital status to define demographic profiles of target buyers.
For example: “25-40 year old females who live in a large metropolitan area.”
Modern marketers, however, are using new technology to transition their marketing approach to segmenting by consumer behaviors, pointing to things like preferences, interests, opinions, and routines.
Demographics tell marketers who typically is interested in a particular product or service based on certain attributes – but today’s marketers and research reveal who is more likely motivated to actually buy.
From a marketing perspective, demographics define what buyers commonly need, but behaviors point directly to preferences, defining what buyers want.
As a marketer, knowing your ideal consumer’s desires is much more powerful than just knowing their physical demographics.
- Learning about your audience will allow you to find out what type of content formats and topics are more likely to resonate with your followers and drive them towards conversion.
- Publishing ads irrelevant to your audience comes at a price. Facebook ads that aren’t tailored to the right audience achieve low relevance score and are more expensive.
- Today’s consumers don’t want to see irrelevant ads, which is reflected in the exploding popularity of ad blockers. They also expect more personalized experiences from brands, with over 30% of users preferring individualized ads.
- The importance of identifying audience personas is still overlooked by many businesses. In fact, as much as 27% of marketers never do customer research, which means analyzing your audience data and using it to fuel your Facebook advertising strategy can give you an upper hand.
Conclusion
It’s uncanny how many entrepreneurs I sit down with that tell me that their target audience is “everyone,” or “everyone in the entire city.” Happens every week. If you’re targeting everyone, you’re targeting nobody.
It’s important to remember that in order to hit the right target, you have to be aiming correctly, and creating a target audience to aim at is your very first step.
I hope that these tips will help you to create your target audience for your digital marketing efforts.
Still struggling with creating your target audience? Comment below with a question and I’ll help any way that I can.
When you’re running a small business, taking time out of your already-packed day to identify your target market is probably the last thing on your mind. It may even feel like an extraneous step when you’re creating a marketing plan. After all, you know your customers like your product or service. But that knowledge isn’t enough.
When you precisely identify your target customer, you’ll be able to tailor your marketing efforts, products and services to speak directly to him/her. That way, you can build a loyal customer base that drives repeat sales.
Remember, your target customer doesn’t have to be an existing customer. In fact, they don’t even have to be aware that your business exists — yet. By having a clear picture of who your target market is, you’ll be able to create marketing plans that resonate with those qualified buyers and converts them to paying customers.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is the demographic of people most likely to be interested in your product or service.
An intimate part of a business plan is having a clear understanding of this perfect client. That is, you can comfortably demonstrate the who, what, why, where, when and of your product or service.
Essentially, you can pinpoint:
- What features your business, product or service offer
- How those features are different from everyone else’s
- What are the benefits of those features or what problem they are linked to address
- How those benefits matter or help solve a customer’s problem
- Who is likely to buy from you for the above benefits. Be sure to include their age, financial status, marital status, education level, employment status, and so on
If you own an hvac company, your target audience begins with property owners, both commercial and residential.
If you own a toy store, your target audience starts with parents, grandparents, and anyone else with children in their lives.
Hence, marketing without first defining your market segment is a lot like driving without directions. You spend a lot of time, fuel dollars and effort making the wrong turns.
Why define my target audience?
Since it’s impossible to reach everyone at once, narrowing your focus to a core audience helps you to develop an effective marketing strategy. It helps your company craft a messaging strategy that appeals directly to the type of consumers who are more likely to convert into customers.
For example, Facebook Ads allow you to target users according to their interests.
It is also more cost-effective to refine your audience, because your campaigns are run on a smaller, more focused scale.
If you’re a residential painter but you only want to paint luxury homes or high dollar homes, focusing your marketing to homeowners that live in areas with luxury homes is more beneficial than trying to advertise to every single homeowner in your region.
In order for people to “buy into” a product or service, they need to relate to the tone and content of the message. By striking a chord with someone, a personal connection is made, and trust is established
How To Define My Target Audience
As we discussed, defining this audience is paramount to your marketing success. So, let’s go over a few questions that you’ll need to answer, which will help you to create a buyer persona:
Who did you have in mind when you thought about making or selling your product or service?
Before making a decision of going into a particular business, one must have thought about different aspects of it, including things like supply and demand and potential competition.
The target market is one of the first things to think of in such situations.
What do they need and how can you offer that to them?
Sometimes it is more important to understand your target frustrations and needs than to have a great and catchy viral video with your product in it.
However, you have to be really clever about using it. Mostly it depends on your experience.
Think about what is it that you can help them with, and is what you offer better than other solutions?
Where do they get their information?
I don’t mean just the news. I mean any information. If they use Facebook, that is information.
So, what social networks does your target audience use?
Which websites do they visit?
Which magazines do they read?
Do they like watching the Vampire Diaries or are they into True Detective?
This is important because media, including social media, is the best way of interacting with your target audience.
What Are Your Potential Customers’ Pain-Points?
A mistake many businesses make is to assume buyers care much about their brand. Contrary, buyers really care about what you can help them solve.
You make a mistake every time you talk about yourself instead of addressing what you are doing to elevate the suffering of your customer.
And you need to research what exactly your clients love about your product or service. Many times, it might not be what it seems.
A good example:
Popular thinking attributes Apple’s massive success to producing superior hardware and software. But experts know better.
Apple’s diehard flock, ultimately, desires and values the emotional fulfillment an Apple device gives them. This includes perceived quality, superior technology, and the feeling of being a part of an advanced movement/society.
Clever and effective marketing, backed by a crisp understanding of their customer, helps Apple to make buyers feel a part of a special, privileged group.
The emotional connection brewed helps the Silicon Valley giant to steer clear of the competition. They end up selling dozens of millions of devices in mature smartphone markets than any other smartphone maker.
What is it that makes them spend money?
This is a tricky one. You need to think about how your product or service integrates with what your target group is willing and has the possibility to spend money on.
What will it take to make the purchase?
Are those emotions, necessity, desire for adventure or feeling beautiful? Or is it something else? Whatever it is, your product needs to be aligned with their trigger.
If you are advertising roofing services, target those homeowners that will eventually need to fix or repair their roofs.
Or if you are offering Managed IT services, remind people that they need to keep their business and private affairs secure and that your IT service solves that concern.
Need More Reasons?
When marketers discuss “segmentation,” they’re more often than not referring to demographic segmentation. Demographic segmentation is a hallmark of marketing campaign strategy, honing in on characteristics such as age, gender, location, income level, and marital status to define demographic profiles of target buyers.
For example: “25-40 year old females who live in a large metropolitan area.”
Modern marketers, however, are using new technology to transition their marketing approach to segmenting by consumer behaviors, pointing to things like preferences, interests, opinions, and routines.
Demographics tell marketers who typically is interested in a particular product or service based on certain attributes – but today’s marketers and research reveal who is more likely motivated to actually buy.
From a marketing perspective, demographics define what buyers commonly need, but behaviors point directly to preferences, defining what buyers want.
As a marketer, knowing your ideal consumer’s desires is much more powerful than just knowing their physical demographics.
- Learning about your audience will allow you to find out what type of content formats and topics are more likely to resonate with your followers and drive them towards conversion.
- Publishing ads irrelevant to your audience comes at a price. Facebook ads that aren’t tailored to the right audience achieve low relevance score and are more expensive.
- Today’s consumers don’t want to see irrelevant ads, which is reflected in the exploding popularity of ad blockers. They also expect more personalized experiences from brands, with over 30% of users preferring individualized ads.
- The importance of identifying audience personas is still overlooked by many businesses. In fact, as much as 27% of marketers never do customer research, which means analyzing your audience data and using it to fuel your Facebook advertising strategy can give you an upper hand.
Conclusion
It’s uncanny how many entrepreneurs I sit down with that tell me that their target audience is “everyone,” or “everyone in the entire city.” Happens every week. If you’re targeting everyone, you’re targeting nobody.
It’s important to remember that in order to hit the right target, you have to be aiming correctly, and creating a target audience to aim at is your very first step.
I hope that these tips will help you to create your target audience for your digital marketing efforts.
Still struggling with creating your target audience? Comment below with a question and I’ll help any way that I can.