Aim and Fire! Identifying your Target your Audience
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For any sole trader, partnership or business selling a product or service, identifying your target audience is a brain teaser.  We all know that it's a key element of the marketing strategy, particularly when focusing on online or digital marketing efforts, but just how do you go about not only knowing who your target audience is, but also identifying the audience that's going to buy your product or service.

Do a search on Google and hundreds of blogs, tips and guides will be displayed; doesn't really make the task any easier!  Any marketer, sales person and business owner understands that the success to any marketing campaign, and the best way to maximise budget, is a good return on your investment (ROI).  How to achieve that is another matter entirely.  There are very few brands that are lucky enough to have that all-important universal appeal.  Most brands are fighting for their place in a competitive market environment and that's why it's important to identify your target audience.

What is a target audience?

First and foremost, let's take a quick look at defining what a target audience is.  One definition is that a target audience 'is a group of people defined by certain demographics and behaviours'.  It is these groups that businesses want to aim at to attract them to their products or services.

There are several reasons why it's important to understand your target audience:

  • To catch the attention of new customers.

  • To generate high quality leads.

  • To retain existing customers.

  • To maximise marketing budgets and ROI.

There are a variety of demographic factors that can help in determining who your target audience is, such as gender, age, location and interests.  To find out more about your audience, other demographics include income, education, marital status, profession, personality, lifestyle, opinions and attitudes.   The more layers of information you have on your audience, the more targeted your marketing campaigns can be.

Target audience vs target market

These two terms, although similar, are different.  A target market defines the market segment of your business, i.e. its products, services and its brand.   A target audience refers to the customers who will likely buy, or are buying, your product or service.  However, identifying your target market is the first step to knowing your target audience.  Let's delve a little deeper.

A target market is the identified group of people to which you want to aim your product or service who potentially will buy your brand.  The aim is to put your product or service in front of these people and to build awareness of your brand.  Target markets are much broader in their scope, although demographics can narrow the approach.

A target audience is a smaller group of people within your identified target market that is more likely to buy your product or service.  The idea is to find that group of people who you believe are going to engage with your brand and make a purchase.  There are two principal audience groups - known and unknown.  Your known audience is previous contacts and existing customers; whereas your unknown audience are people you've had no previous contact with, and new customers.

Why identify a target audience?

One mistake that marketers make is to try to appeal to too large a group of people, thereby diluting the brand message.  An important element of identifying your target market is focus.  Once you have a focused audience with a strong likelihood they will engage with your brand, sales growth will follow.  Just about every business has social media platforms; a large proportion use LinkedIn, considered to be a predominantly business-to-business social media platform.  To help identify your target audience, automation tools like Zopto can be used to find the relevant audience and leads for your product or service by filtering your ideal customers.

Defining your target audience

Once you have your demographic data, the next step is to identify your target audience through your product, i.e.:

  • Why would a customer want your product or service?

  • What are the features that will benefit your customer?

  • What are the benefits of each feature that will be useful to your customer?

  • Who will benefit from your product or service and why?

  • Is your product or service in a niche sector?

According to the product or service you are promoting, break down your audience further to identify the generation you are looking to target, such as:

  • Baby boomers - 54-72 years old.

  • Generation X - 38-53 years old.

  • Millennials - 22-37 years old.

  • Generation Z - 0-21 years old.

There are three principal steps to identifying your target audience.

Step 1 - whenever you're defining who your target audience is, always keep in mind your product or service unique selling points (USPs); why will it fulfil your customer's desires and satisfy their needs?  Does your product or service solve a problem?  Does it possess the 'must have' factor?  Does it fill the need for specific customers?  Work out what the benefits are to your customers, existing and new, to help identify your target market.  

Step 2 - using the demographic data and information you've gathered, refine your audience further to ensure your marketing strategy is focused on your target market.  The aim is to create your ideal customer or buyer persona.  One tip is to avoid assumptions.  It's easy to be biased about your product or service; it's your brand and you're enthusiastic about it.  However, put yourself in the place of your customers and view it from their point of view.

Step 3 - you've got your target market and you've broken that down into your target audience; is that audience big enough to sustain your business?  Will enough people purchase your product or service to make your marketing efforts worthwhile?  Analyse whether your target audience have sufficient means to be able to afford it, and how often they are likely to make a purchase.  At this point, do your research on your key competitors and compare their offering with yours, which will enable you to refine your target audience further.

Conclusion


Identifying your target audience is a science but with automation tools such as Zopto, defining the ideal buyer persona through the gathering of the right demographics makes the task much easier.  That said, if you're not on social media then identifying your target audience will be a Herculean task, unless your product or service is in such a niche market.  Zopto helps businesses to not only identify target audiences and generate valuable leads from LinkedIn, but also source new customers from different networks and speed up the process of entering new markets. 

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