Why knowing your target audience better could make it super profitable for your business this year!You are marketing your product or service, but we agree that you are likely not selling to EVERYONE.
Therefore, everything you do is laser-targeted towards attracting and closing that one “ideal customer” type, aka your target audience, someone who really needs your product or service and is more than happy to pay money to get it.
Target audiences are essential in marketing. So let’s learn everything there is to a target audience, including the benefits of getting to the right target audience and how even to do it in the first place, so you can get more bang for your marketing spend bucks!
What is a Target Audience? Definition
Precisely what is a targeted audience? The dead-simple meaning of the target audience is a specific group of target people who show interest in your product, service, or business and are more likely to become target customers in the future.
In other words, they are your ideal prospect or, simply put – the intended audience.
Depending on your exact business, you may have one or more target audiences. For example, a firm that provides Digital Marketing services could work with big-sized blue-chip companies on one hand and solopreneurs (one-person companies) on the other.
Types of Target Audiences
Most businesses will likely deal with multiple “types” of ideal prospects—e.g. when your product solves a problem common to both working women and college students.
We segment our target audience into different “Customer Avatars” or “Buyer Personas” when this happens. This segmentation can happen based on various considerations. Some of the key ones are as listed below:
- Audience Demographics: Age, Gender, education level, Income levels, marital status, parenthood status, subcultures based on race or religion, etc.
- Psychographics: Core Values, personal beliefs, hobbies & pass time activities, professional interests, Personality types, lifestyle choices, etc.
- Habits & Behaviors: Purchase intent, living habits, engagements, interactions, etc.
- Geographics: Local businesses, Same city or state, Particular country or international targeting, etc
- Existing Customer: A group of individuals who are already customers of a business or organization and who may be targeted with loyalty or upselling campaigns.
- Prospective Customer: A group of individuals who have not yet purchased from a business or organization but who may be interested in doing so in the future.
- Niche Audience: A smaller, highly specialized group of individuals with specific needs or interests.
- Mass Market: A very large, diverse group of individuals with broad interests or needs.
Examples of classification of target audiences:
- Age range – e.g., 25-40 yrs old
- Gender – e.g., Female audience only for a beauty make-up product
- Location of residence – e.g., living in and around New York City only
- Education Level – E.g., Graduates only
- Socioeconomic status – E.g., iPhone or Mac users only
- Income Levels – E.g. earning at least $1,00,000 yearly
Often finer niches and more granular groups are referred to as Subcultures, while theming these Subcultures under the leading target group leads us to a Superculture.
Example of Target Audience in Advertising
For example, you run a company offering custom-printed t-shirts for casual wear aimed at the younger crowds, and you plan to advertise this over Facebook.
You will not want to show the same advertisement with the same creatives to your entire audience set. Our target demographic information factors of interest would be gender and age group first.
So it would be good to start segmenting them based on these criteria first. And then by their personal interests etc., next up.
Audience Set 1
- Gender: Male
- Age Group: 15-25 yrs
- Interest Set: Music bands, Pop culture, Naruto, Japanese Animes
Audience Set 2
- Gender: Male
- Age Group: 25-35 yrs
- Interests: Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Entrepreneurs, Adventure, Motivation, Travel, Office casual wear
Another audience set can be built for higher age groups in men. The female consumer will have similar sets built for them.
Multiple target audience sets can be made once you understand what you are selling and who will buy it.
This is a classic example of how knowing your target audience better will also help you make a better product for that segment. Because you are determining audience needs better.
The product design will feature color and messaging variations by age group and gender. For instance, cool and funky messages for the younger and more hip crowd, simple creatives with polite messaging (if any) for the older crowd. You get the drift!
Among other things, your Facebook advertisement will feature a different creative copy for each ad catering to the above target audience sets. It should make it seem like your ad is speaking to them and them alone.
6 Ways to Determine Your Target Audience
The overall idea is to map out the most likely types of customers your business will get. Some of the general principles surrounding target audiences are as follows:
- Every business has a target audience it sells to. And the business needs to figure this out at the earliest to ensure that everything beginning with the marketing the right message, targeting, advertising, and overall marketing dollar, is being spent on the right set of people.
- Research your target market: Gather data about your target market through various sources, such as market research studies, customer surveys, or social media analytics. This can help you better understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors.
- More often than not, businesses will have a single primary audience and multiple target audiences who have different use cases or pain points that your product or service claims to solve. Employ customer segmentation to ensure a high degree of marketing personalization in such cases.
- Each set of target audiences is mapped into “Buyer Personas” groups. People inside a given customer persona set exhibit common characteristics, repetitive patterns, and shared interests. Some of these may be your exact audience (generating more business), and you might allocate more marketing dollars to them than other audience sets.
- Suppose you have a specific product (e.g., Kitchen Timer). In that case, go very specific with defining your target audience and get better results for your marketing campaign run over these audience sets. As a rule of thumb, the more specific audiences you’re targeting, the business will spend more time and effort identifying them through detailed research.
- Test and refine your targeting: Use various marketing tactics to reach and engage with your target audience, and gather data about the effectiveness of these efforts. Use this data to adjust your targeting and messaging as needed.
Remember that your target audience may evolve over time as your business grows and changes, so it is important to regularly review and update your targeting strategies.
Benefits of Defining Your Target Audience
Most people are not your prospects. As a result, your business is only ever selling to a tiny percentage of online buyers. Target audience refers to this small target group of people who are likely to trust you because you may have something they need.
- Defining your target audience sets comes packed with tons of many advantages — benefits that make it a no-brainer for every business to do.
- Deeper Customer Loyalty through Better Marketing Messages. The better you understand your prospects, the better you can talk to them in a language they understand.
- Better Ad Spend ROI through focused targeting in advertising. Laser-targeted ads to prospects who’ve already shown a degree of interest are guaranteed to convert better.
- Better Sales Conversions over email marketing. Once you nail your “Customer Avatar” or “Buyer Persona” down, your emails will show increased open rates, better deliverability, and just vastly improved replies and conversions.
- Stand out from your competition with ease. Prospects will prefer to work with you over a competitor who doesn’t speak directly to them or target them specifically.
All in all, identifying who could be most interested in your products or services and communicating with them directly first puts more money into your coffers faster and with lesser effort.
Generally, you will know when you are speaking to the right audience. Because then, you will see better results from your ads, and your social media posts getting more reach.
Because increased engagement with your ideal social media target audience will get you more replies to your emails and overall just better ROI for everything that represents your marketing efforts.
Building a Target Audience – Targeting Audience Strategies
Building your target audience gets done right when you keep it simple. We recommend below steps:
- Audit your current customers for clues. Try to understand their demographics, mindset and psychology, shared interests, how they start trusting, their buying journey, and how they eventually invested in your business. Target audience research is crucial and can be eye-opening when done right.
- List the biggest customer demands that your product or service solves.
- Now identify the people who are likely already suffering from these pain points.
- List down their likes, dislikes, fears, frustrations, ambitions, aspirations—everything about them.
- Identify where they hang out online the most. Say for relaxation? Or to get more information? Do they like to read blogs more than watch videos? If yes, you are probably wasting your time making those awesome Youtube videos.
- Competitors targeting is easier and faster to see who’s already got it right. Check out your competition, the types of people they are targeting, the social media platforms they are running ads on, profile and research everything they do with their audiences!
To begin with, new businesses or those operating in a brand new niche may know very little about their target audience or even their own target market. As a result, they will initially struggle with the target audience vs. the actual audience conundrum.
Established businesses with thousands of existing customers or those operating out of well-known niches can see their ideal customers more clearly. Regardless, once you start focusing on getting your target market right, you will get a precise customer base eventually.
Also read: 10 New Customer Acquisition Strategies
Using the Right Tool to Nail Down Potential Customers
Getting your target audience right is only part of the game. Marketing is all about communicating with them regularly. What better ways than email and SMS?
Email provides an ROI of over 4,200%, while SMS open rates are over 98%.
We highly recommend using a reliable, user-friendly tool such as Sender to easily do all of your email and SMS marketing from one unified platform.
Sender supports complex automation, workflows, and trigger actions involving both emails and SMS that will only take your customers’ engagement through the roof.
Additionally, advanced subscriber management systems will make your job easier by allowing advanced segmentation within the platform.
Small to medium businesses and ecommerce companies find Sender perfect for their needs because it is cost-effective and offers a great FREE plan (2,500 contacts, 15,000 emails monthly) that lets you test and run your business without paying a single penny.
Selling to the Right Target Audience
The importance of knowing your prospect better can never be overrated or go out of fashion. It’s a must. Any marketing you’ll ever do will be in the target market.
As a matter of fact, your entire marketing strategy delicately hangs in the balance until you’ve nailed your target audience down clearly. Because unless and until you do, you don’t know who might be interested in your product or service that you need to communicate with and how.
Also, know that it would be near-impossible for your marketing to fail once you do.
Also read:
Content Contributor – Santosh Balakrishnan
