How to Define Your Target Audience
Any marketer knows that you need to narrow down your target audience before you start pushing your campaigns. A target audience refers to the demographic your sales and marketing efforts will be geared towards. This helps allocate your budget and resources properly, without wasting them on audiences that aren’t even relevant to you. After all, no company wants to throw away precious resources on something that won’t get the returns they want. Once you define your target audience, you can optimize the ROI of your marketing and sales activities. You can also plan these activities and the tone of your campaigns accordingly.
However, you can’t just randomly guess who to target. You need to evaluate a number of metrics before you narrow down who your target audience is. In addition, you should do this for each of your products, as they may have different audiences. For example, a cable connection like Spectrum TV will have a completely different target audience than a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu. In addition, these demographics are not just based on age and gender. There are a number of other elements like location, interests, and audience behavior that you need to consider. Here’s a short guide to making things easier for you when defining your target audience.
Identify Your Current Customer Base
First of all, you should figure out who is currently buying your product or utilizing your services. The customers you already have are the perfect starting point for determining who your target audience is. See what age group, income group, gender, and interests they belong to so that you can narrow down who the right audience is for your marketing purposes.
You should note these down, complete with analytical data, which shows audience behavior, visit times, number of visits, and all such metrics which can help you make the right targeting and posting decisions.
Analyze Your Product Or Service
You also need to analyze your product or service thoroughly. Determine who benefits from it, who can afford it, and what needs it serves. This will help you figure out who your target audience should be. After all, you wouldn’t be targeting college counseling services to people in their 60s without children.
Once you know what gap you are filling, you can also determine who would benefit from your product. Then, you can target your marketing efforts towards this audience accordingly.
Evaluate Your Competition
Do not underestimate what your competitors are doing. This does not mean that you completely copy their strategy. Take a look at what they’re doing, take a cue from it, and take inspiration from what is working for them.
Furthermore, this strategy will also help you see if there are any potential audiences that your competitors are ignoring. These audiences will give you the perfect opportunity to dominate a sector of the market.
Explore A Niche Audience
If you’re new to your business and are having trouble catching up with the big guns, don’t worry. You don't have to beat them at their own game. Instead, you can carve out your own niche instead. See what audiences they are not focusing on, and swoop in to dominate that segment.
This will help you carve out your own niche in the market, and become a contender in your own right. It also means you won’t have to spend as much money on marketing campaigns because you’re discovering an unexplored audience rather than fighting with the big companies for an already brand-loyal one.
Justify Your Decisions
Whatever methods you use, you need to justify your decisions. Therefore, when you decide on an audience, do not just run one campaign. Do A/B testing with different audience variants. In addition, you should also call in focus groups and do surveys to get their feedback.
This will help justify your decisions, have solid proof of their effectiveness, and then you can go ahead with the full-fledged campaigns.
In conclusion, you need to define your target audience by exploring their behavior, seeing what your competitors are doing, and getting solid proof of your strategy’s effectiveness.
