Marketers talk a lot about target audiences. A more specific group than your target market, these are the people you really need to get the message to and can include both individuals and businesses. How do you go about identifying your target audience in the first place? Let’s break it down into five key steps.
1. What is your key product/service?
You will need to determine exactly what you offer to potential customers to identify your target audience; for example, what kind of problem does your product solve and who might benefit from it? Answering such questions is key to identifying your target audience
2. Research the market
Do some market and competitor research to see how your main competitors define their target market. You can get a sense of this through their brand marketing, specifically digital marketing.
3. Create profiles
Using the information you discovered in the first two steps (determining your product and researching the market), create imagined personas or profiles of the people you think you should target. Use demographic, lifestyle, and behaviour information to create these profiles.
4. Choose your channels
As you create your personas and try to identify the audience, think about the different channels they might look at and engage with. Not only can this be helpful for research but also it will show you the best place to try to send a message to your newly defined target audience.
5. Use surveys to test your audience
Identifying a target audience often requires refinement; even when you think you have defined it, additional audience testing can help you to perfect it. Use surveys to test, refine, and – if necessary – redefine your target audience.
Creating, distributing, collating, and analysing surveys is a specialist job, so it might be wise to work with professional marketing strategy consultants. Agencies such as www.reallyhelpfulmarketing.co.uk/specialist-services/marketing-strategy-consultant/ can assist with all your survey needs.
Identifying your target audience is key to getting the right message to the right people. It can save you considerable time and money and will ultimately increase sales.
