Maintaining a well-defined market is of supreme importance when you want to run a business successfully.
Defining the proper target is one of the best practices to succeed in online business.
While no one can afford to target another person, defining the proper target audience allows the small and medium-sized companies by targeting a precise niche market.
Many businesses say they target all kinds of people who are interested in their services.
Some businesses target homeowners, some target small-scale businesses while some target stay-at-home mothers. These kinds of targeting are more generic in nature and will not yield you better results.
Zeroing on a specific target or on a specific community niche will not only help you to exclude people who are a misfit for your criteria but will also guide you to focus entirely on developing your brand products and improving your market foothold.
So, let us look at some of the steps that can be followed to define your niche specific target audience.
Who is the Target Audience?
Okay, if we are so obsessed about the target audience of a business, then we just need to understand, what we mean by the term ‘target audience’.
A target audience can be defined as a specific group of people or any community who are most likely to be interested in the products that you advertise or sell.
All businesses typically use the demographic information of any region or country to determine their target audiences.
But, as a small business owner, you cannot analyze pages and pages of demographical statistics to determine your target audience.
So, you first need to analyze what are the products you currently offer that can potentially capture the interests of the audiences. Then look at who your customers are and why they buy products from you specifically?
Look for some common interests and characteristics here. Also, write a comprehensive list of your competitors in this niche along with their best-selling products.
Analyze the common factors in all the best-selling products of your rivals. After considering all these factors, determine your potential target audience groups (a detailed account of finding your target audience is given below).
Examples of Target Audience:
We shall now look at some examples of knowing how to find the target audience for any business.
Let us now consider that you are going to start an SEO business. Obviously, you want your venture to become highly successful making you as a successful SEO consultant.
So, if you want people to know about your venture, then you should make it get listed in the top results of Google search pages.
Before implementing this step, you need to be familiar with the audiences who will get attracted by the display of your search results.
After finding out your target group, create an attractive website along with relevant social media pages that will help you to land your clients.
Always keep widening your target audience base. This will help you to ensure that you get a wide variety of clients with varying needs, giving you more exposure and plenty of opportunities.
Suppose if your business pertains only to a certain region, then narrowing your target audience will help you to achieve your goal.
Who are your potential audiences?
First, who will think of having an excellent SEO service to meet their needs?
- Small business owners
- Independent agencies
- Independent freelancers or bloggers who want to increase their income
- Website owners
- Firms that need an excellent and SEO keyword rich content to elevate their growth
So, all your intended audiences need SEO to boost both their credibility and growth.
While it is true that the needs of each of these categories vary largely, all these people need a good SEO analyst to help them out. Hence, these categories form your main target audience.
Your potential target audiences are those who can become your customers due to the positive word of mouth or due to the testimonials that get published on your website or in your LinkedIn profiles or Facebook pages.
Let us consider another example. Suppose, if you are going to introduce a new beverage for a region. Your target region, in general, is arid and hence, summers are long, and winters are short.
For example, let us say your target region is a tropical country like India. If you want to introduce a new beverage that will quench the thirst of people in India, then your target audience will be,
- Children and young adults (who are more interested in trying different variants of beverages)
- Customers of other successful beverage companies
- People who buy sweetened drinks often
- Parents of young adults and children (persuading them to buy your products)
The reviews that your product gain, the advertisements along with the enthusiasm of your target groups will help you to achieve your goal (i.e.) successfully introducing a new beverage in the Indian consumer markets.
Types of Target Audience:
A well-defined target audience will be helpful for you to tailor your messages that suit their needs. It will also help you to find new avenues where these messages can be effectively reached.
Large-scale businesses with a large budget can target a broad range of audience for greater reach of products. But, this is not possible for all businesses.
Finding a proper target audience and their type is crucial for the success and wholesome growth of a business. In general, there are around 12 different factors that are widely used to differentiate the target audiences. They are
- Everyone: This is a wide-range target audience group, affordable only by large companies and business conglomerates.
For example, a huge and well-known beverage company like Coca Cola can afford to create ads with high market share value for conveying a positive feeling about a new product.
- Demographics: If you want to base your business depending on the choices of products in different regions, then you can zero in on a set of audience who belong to a certain region/area or even a country (depending on the size and ability of your project)
- Culture-based: Understanding the important festivals of a region, the behavioral patterns of a set of people, their religion and other culture-based information will help you to identify a culture-based target audience base.
- Subculture: Suppose if you are specifically interested in a community out of a large cultural base, then you can identify the characteristics of the pertinent subcultures of that region and devise your target audiences.
Super culture: Suppose if you want to make your product amenable for two or more countries, then classifying target audiences based on super culture will do.
For example, if you are targeting a beauty product especially for the French, then your target base would be countries like France, Canada because Canada too has a sizeable amount of French-speaking people.
- Needs: This is one of the well-known target group defining factor since introducing products gauging the needs of the customers will always lead to tremendous success.
- Attitudes and opinion: You can also determine your target audience based on how people feel and think about a certain issue.
- Fans: Yes, you can also determine your target audiences by calculating the fanbase of a product or a venture.
For instance, if someone is a fan of Sachin Tendulkar, then that person is likely to buy those products that are endorsed by Sachin.
- Target market: A target market can be defined as a group of customers for a product or a service. Though it is common for both the target market and audience, to differ addressing the needs of the target market can help you to address the needs of your audience also
- Customers: Existing customers of a firm are always an easy pick. For instance, upgrading to the premium version of an app, renewing some sort of services done by a company fall under this category.
- Lifestyle: You can also select your target audiences based on the kind of lifestyle they lead.
For instance, if you are an audio ebook producing industry, then you may target people who are always on the move and do not have enough time to read.
- Personality: Personality traits can also help you to identify your target group. Persons with like-minded traits are bound to share the same type of preferences.
Now, let us deal with the most important section of this article, namely, defining your target audiences. Promoting your business to anyone and everyone is not at all a winning marketing strategy.
To increase both brand awareness and sales, it is mandatory to focus on the target audience group and make informed decisions.
But, how will you define your audiences and most importantly, how will your marketing strategy appeal to them?
How to Define your Target Audience?
Though this is the final section of this article, understanding the strategies of defining an audience group will help you to find out the exact needs and expectations of your audiences.
Finding out the category of your target audience and classifying the range of your target audiences alone will not help you.
The following aspects will help you to figure out the ways in which you can define your target audiences and help them out.
- Always remain specific and dig deep: Often you can notice marketers providing classifications as ‘females 18-35’, ‘old ages’, ‘millennials’, ‘stay-at-home moms’ etc. These blanket categories will help you to differentiate your target audiences from the more general group.
But, such differentiation will not aid you in your quest since mapping out the target audience needs precision. This will help you to avoid the unnecessary spillage of money or the total waste of energy.
- Get fresh ideas: Compare your current target audience with your earlier customer base (if there are any) to notice both the similarities and differences.
If your current crop of people is radically different from your old customer base, then re-think your strategy.
Are you confident about your new product?
Are you sure that will it work among your new customers?
Do you assert whether this product will satisfy the needs of your new customer base?
Are there any other ways or rethinking or reforming your new product so that it meets the needs of both the old and the new customer as well?
If you can find out the answer to these questions, then you will start gaining fresh insights about the product that you are going to launch for your new customer base.
Your marketing approaches should be fresh, innovative, but they should also be customer-centric. Whatever your marketing questions are, it should never be felt as boring and monotonous among the consumers.
- Think from the customer’s point of view: Begin your approach by answering the following questions
- If I am a customer, will I buy this new product? Or will I not?
- What are the pros and cons of this product?
- How will this new product satisfy my needs?
- Is the brand reliable or is it from a new company?
- Is the price affordable? Or is the product expensive?
- Are there any reviews for this product?
- Is the product worth its price?
- Are there any other similar products in a lower price range?
Try to answer these basic questions genuinely and honestly. This will help you to figure out the advantages of your product and will also help you to rectify its shortcomings.
Also, thinking from the customers’ point of view will help you to analyze whether your product is overpriced or not.
You can think of the products of your rivals too before arriving at a decision. Always, remember the key answers are those that would have arrived out of a customer-centric question.
So, that pretty much sums up all the techniques that are used in the marketing field to define and examine a target audience group.
Try to insulate yourselves and bring out the client opinions about your product. This will help you to gain a third-person perspective while developing, reviewing and shaping up your product.