A target audience is a potential group of consumers or organizations that your business would want to reach with your specific marketing message. Being able to identify and understand your target market is crucial in ensuring that you are creating effective campaigns for your product. Below we have provided five tips to help define your target audience to build your brand and understand how to grow your business.
1. Understand Your Product or Service’s Unique Benefits/Value
To define the target market you must understand how your product or service will benefit potential customers so that they are willing to pay for what you’re offering. Also, is your product unique or is there a similar type of product on the market? If your product is similar to a competitor you must prove what features make your product stand out from the competition. If the product or service is unique it will help you paint a clear picture for your target audience. Now you can start determining “who” your target market is based on the benefits of your product/service providing a solution to their pain points.
2. Determine Their Pain Points
Once the target audience is determined, identifying the pain points of your target audience can be easily discovered. Your company should start off by making a list of customers who suffer from problems or issues that your product or service can resolve. The easiest way to find pain points is to see why your existing customers are buying your product or service. This will help your company identify which customers need your product to help them resolve an issue.
3. Create Buyer Personas
To have a successful marketing campaign you must connect with the target audience emotionally. The way to do that is to create the right buyer personas. There are two main aspects of buyer personas demographics and psychographics. Demographics is a criteria that your company can use to specify/describe a certain group of people. They include age, geographic location, gender, and occupation. Psychographics help define the personality of your audience. This includes things potential customers value the most such as likes and dislikes, opinions, hobbies and lifestyle choices. These two factors will help you define your target audience with great detail.
4. Study Your Competition
In marketing, you will learn a lot from your competition by analyzing what they are doing and what they are not doing. It is easy to identify areas where competitors have failed to satisfy their buyers. If you can make the competitor’s customers go from unsatisfied to satisfied they will be more willing to buy your product or service.
5. Evaluate Your Target Market
Focus your branding and marketing strategies on a specific group of people who have a need, want, or interest in your product. Once the target audience has been found you should test and analyze it before refining your marketing strategy. Once you know who your target audience is, you will be able to convey a stronger and more direct message, which will lead to more interest for your company and an increased return on your investments. Having an unfocused target audience will make it difficult to create an effective marketing strategy. This is why you have to evaluate your target audience carefully.
A well-defined target audience will allow you to make smarter and more effective marketing decisions. The foundation of your marketing plan should be defined as who your customers are and what their needs are. If you need any help defining your target audience please feel free to reach out, we’re happy to help!
Danielle Foley, Owner
Foley Marketing Advisors
dfoley@foleymarketingadvisors.com