Until you define your target audience, your marketing strategies are not likely to bear fruits. You may think that your products or services can attract a larger number, but the truth is, it is not reasonable to market to everyone out there. Defining your target audience helps you not waste time and resources on people who are not likely to purchase from you.
Target market definition
A target market is a particular group of people you intend to reach with your products or services. These are simply the people who are likely to make a purchase from you. A target market possesses similar characteristics. Here are the steps towards identifying your target audience:
1. Examine Your Current Customers
Your existing customers make are the largest number of your audience. Closely examining some factors about your buyers will help you strategize how to reach a larger audience. Each of your customers has a history of their purchase. Here are some of the data from your previous customers that you are going to use in order to properly identify your target audience.:
Age: You need to know if your customers are middle-aged, millennials or seniors. Customers from different age clusters are likely to respond differently to products’ designs, pricing and marketing.
Interests: You need to know what activities your customers love engaging in. Know other businesses that they would be involved in.
Income level: How much money do your customers earn? How much do they spend? Answering these questions will help you strategize your marketing. Remember it is normal for low-income customers to want to buy products that save them a coin while high-income families may not have a problem with the pricing of your products and services
- Determine how much money your customers spend on average.
Location: Location largely influences the buying habits of your customers. People in urban setups tend to buy more than those in rural. A location will help you know which geographical areas you need to target with your products or services. While still on location; do not forget to look at your customers time zone. This will help you know when to share online or run your ads so as to engage as many people as possible.
2. Conduct Primary Research
Conducting this type of research can be costly. However, it gives you a chance to hear from the horse’s mouth; your customers and targeted customers. Here are some ways to conduct primary research:
Use focus groups: Get a focus group that fits your customer profile and end engage in discussions about their needs, interests and point of concerns.
Interviews: take advantage of trade shows and high traffic areas to ask a group of people what they think about buying from a small business.
Conduct surveys: sending out a questionnaire to your target market and your customers and ask them to help you fill. You may use email to reach out to this group of people.
3. Make Use of Existing Data
You can make good use of existing data when you are in a hurry to identify your target audience. What type of data can you use? There are several online tools that can provide you with all this information depending on your main interest. For example, Google trends inform you of the location of your target audience customer as well as potential customer buying behaviours
- Another way of conducting target market research is by inviting your customers to share their information each time they make a purchase.
4. Spy on Your Competitors
Take advantage of your competitors’ customer target strategies. Look at their marketing strategies by studying how they conduct their campaigns. This should give you a good picture of their audience. Also, look for some leaks in their business and take advantage of that so that you effortlessly stay ahead of everyone. Also, Identify:
- The type of customers purchasing from them
- How much they sell their products and services
- How they engaging with their customers on social media
- The gaps in their business
5. Focus
To correctly define your target audience; you will need to be specific. Specificity in audience targeting will not limit you but give you a real insight of who your potential customers are. Look at their attitude, pain points and interest. Understand that these factors will help create products or services that are specific to your customers or targeted audience.
6. Create a Target Market Picture
After conducting research on what sort of people make your audience; you need to develop a target audience persona to help you have a clear picture of who they really are. Consider the most crucial behavioural and demographic characteristics that you already identified. This is vital in helping you create services and products that sell. Let your target market persona contain the following fields:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interests(activities)
The main reason for this kind of sampling is to narrow down to a simple idea that can influence your marketing strategies.
7. Conduct Tests
Already have your target audience fully identified? That’s not all; you will need to test some ads on them to see how they respond. You can create an ad or use any that exists for your business just make sure the language used is appropriate and that the images are sensitive to them.
8. Re-evaluate Your Target Audience
Depending on the results from your tests, you may modify your target audience persona. Remember that your audience has different needs each day. They also interact with other brands on a daily basis that might have what you are not offering. For this reason, it is important to keep on adjusting your target market profile so that your products and services reach the right people.
Wrapping up
Defining your target audience is a continuous process. Doing it from time to time enables you to shift with your client’s needs as they also evolve. Targeting specific people will help minimize how much you spend trying to reach the wrong audience. We hope this article helped you get an insight on how to properly conduct a target audience research for your business.
Swansea Digital Marketing, 306 Llangyfelach Road, Brynhyfryd, Swansea, SA5 9LG. Tel: 07946 212 620
