Who is your target audience? Every business has one, and many have established exactly who they want to reach. But that’s not always the case.
For a business to succeed, it needs clear answers to several questions:
- How well do you know your customers?
- Why do they buy your products and services?
- Could you be doing more to meet their needs?
- What about those people and businesses who are not yet your customers? Can they become new customers?
- Who are the best prospects? Who should you ignore?
Businesses can use these questions to develop a detailed understanding of the audience (or audiences) to target. That group of people or businesses becomes your business’s target audience – and the better you know it, the better your business will fare.
What Is a Target Audience?
A business’s target audience is the people or businesses most inclined to purchase what it has to offer. They usually share a set of common traits.
Once you've defined it, you can refine your offerings to better align with your target audience’s preferences. Along with competitive pricing, this can help ensure you a steady stream of loyal customers.
This group isn't the same as your current set of customers, although the two groups should overlap to a large extent.
Conversely, there may be customers who aren’t the best fit for the products and services your business provides. They may cost your business money if you’re continuing to provide them with services and support, but the likelihood of them upgrading or buying additional products is small. This group also needs to be identified, so you can focus your marketing plan on more profitable prospects.
There will also be people among your customers who are part of your target audience, but who have requirements and expectations your business isn’t currently meeting. Again, this is crucial for you to know. By identifying these expectations and refining your offerings to better meet them, you have a golden opportunity to increase these customers’ loyalty and grow your sales.
What Is an Example of a Target Audience?
A target audience can be any market segment your company serves and is characterized by a common set of demographics and interests. Teenage girls who love fashion, for instance, may be the target audience of a new clothing company. Homeowners, landlords, and property managers might make up the target audience for a plumbing supply company.
Target audiences can also be defined by their geographic location and their relationship to your business:
Cold audiences, for example, are people who have never interacted with your business before, never visited your website or social media posts, and may have never seen one of your ads. You first have to grab their attention.
Warm audiences, on the other hand, already have some awareness of your business. They may consist of former customers, email newsletter subscribers, website visitors, or social media followers. These people know who you are and what you do and may have already shown an interest in what you offer.
Current customers are another distinct audience. Current customers are easy to target because they are already quite familiar with your business and are clearly interested in what it has to offer. This makes them a natural source of repeat business and new business.
Each of these target audiences needs to be approached and treated differently, as they are situated at different stages of your sales funnel.
Carefully identifying your business’s target audience allows you to zero in on your most promising sales prospects and make the most of your marketing dollars.
How Do You Find Your Target Audience?
How do you go about identifying your target audiences and determining what they need?
Here are six straightforward steps to follow to conduct a customer behavior analysis:
1. Examine your existing customer base.
What traits do your customers have in common? Are their demographics similar? What type of buying behaviors do they exhibit? This type of research should be your starting point.
2. Address pain points.
Based on what you’ve uncovered, draw up a list of the biggest pain points your customers want addressed and all the ways your products or services do this. In some cases, this may lead you to modify or expand your product line to more fully meet customer needs.
3. Identify the target audience.
Now identify the groups of people who are most likely to experience these same pain points. This is the audience that you want to target. To know these people better, consider their needs, likes, dislikes, fears, frustrations, and other characteristics. How closely do they match what you’ve learned about your customers? While the two groups may not be synonymous, they should be very similar.
4. Reach your audience.
What you’ve discovered about the members of your newly defined target audience will suggest how to best reach them. Where do they congregate online? How do they research their purchases? Do they prefer reading blogs or watching videos? What do they do for entertainment? Answer these questions to determine how you can best peak their interest.
5. Research competitors.
Do research on your competitors as well. They may not always get it right, but you can learn from both their successes and their mistakes. Who are they targeting, and how are they going about it? This is a very simple way to uncover anything you may have overlooked.
6. Test a campaign.
Using what you’ve learned, launch a marketing campaign and pay close attention to the outcomes. Mistakes are part of the learning curve, and few businesses can do this perfectly the first time. Instead, refine what you’re doing to improve your results. Which blogs were the most read? Which sites were the most heavily trafficked? Which ads had the highest number of click-throughs? Consistently monitor these insights; before long you can be rapidly converting your target audience into new and loyal customers.
The Takeaway
Carefully identifying your business’s target audience allows you to zero in on your most promising sales prospects and make the most of your marketing dollars. It also helps you better understand your best customers, so you can improve sales and loyalty by better aligning your offerings with their needs and expectations.
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