Target Audiences and Where to Find Them?
It’s extremely costly and time-consuming to promote a product or service to every human being on the planet. A company needs to define its target audience and concentrate efforts on people who can bring sufficient profit.
So, what is a target audience?
Every product or service is a solution to a specific problem. Consumers have certain demands, while companies help to satisfy them. A group of people who have a demand that your product can satisfy is your target audience. However, if your company makes T-shirts, a target audience of “people that need some clothes” will be too vast. There are lots of clothing brands on the market and so you need to find consumers that would be interested in specific T-shirts.
Defining your target audience
Marketers invest a lot of resources while engaging their target audience. Those are the people you need to steer further to determine your company’s long-term strategy. If you invest efforts into something, it is natural to expect an appropriate profit. Yet, only the most accurate audience will provide you with the greatest return. Here are 3 steps to define your audience:
1. Market exploration
Segment your audience to get a clear understanding of your niche. You could split people by their age, gender, values, behavior, and needs. Every aspect of human life could be fit for segmentation, but make sure that you have stable, clear and coherent to your niche groups.
The most obvious way to segment the audience is to use demographic information. Men, women, students (18–23 years), adults (24–45 years), etc. — these are the most basic ways to define the audience. However, segmented in such a way groups tend to change in time and are often too vast.
The demand-based segmentation strategy is the only one that will give you all important information. Demand is actually the reason a customer starts looking for some type of a product. When your customer engagement is focused on their needs — you are able to show them exactly the benefits of your brand that influences their buying decision.
2. Choose the perfect segment
Splitting budgets to cover the vast audience groups will leave you with mediocre results at best. Select one or two segments that will gain your brand the biggest profit. The 80/20 rule still works (20% of the audience gives a brand 80% of income). To be efficient you have to select and focus on the core customers.
The ideal customer has to fit several main criterias. First of all, the product or service has to be a perfect solution for your target customer. The benefits of the product should be really of a great value for the buyer. The segment also has to be large enough to return efforts and promise some limited growth.
3. Know the name and the face of your customer
Now, when you know your segment, it is time to walk a few miles in your target customer’s shoes. You have to gather as much information about the everyday life of your target audience as you can. Where your audience lives, where spends their free time, what your customers admire — you have to understand your potential clients deeply to offer the product they will be happy to buy. The efforts you have spent on the audience research will bring you additional revenue in future.
Where to find them?
Think like your target audience. People of different gender and age consume information differently. While older people use to read newspapers and watch TV, new generations prefer social media, like Twitter or Instagram. When searching for a way to deliver your message to the target audience, keep in mind what media this group of people consumes.
