Identifying your target audience can make your marketing campaigns significantly more cost-effective. This is because they help you to focus your efforts on specific prospective customers who are more likely to actually follow through on purchasing the kinds of goods or services you sell.
Properly optimizing and managing your ad-spend is essential, so doesn’t it make more sense to get the most you can out of your budget?
What is a Target Audience?
Simply put, your target audience is the people who want or need the product or service that you sell. What you sell will determine the demographics of the people who are part of your target audience. For example, if you sell cars, your target audience is people who want or need to purchase a car in the near future.
Defining Your Target Audience
Defining your target audience is important because it keeps you from wasting marketing dollars. In the above example, if you sell cars, there is no point in spending money on advertising to people who are too young to drive or do not drive at all.
To define your target audience, follow these steps:
Consider Your Current Customers
Get to know your customers and find out who they are. Future customers are likely to be similar in their demographics to the customers that you already have. Therefore, it is important to know their age, where they are from, and the other things they are interested in.
Lean on Market Research
Identify trends in your industry and with products similar to yours. Are there areas of need that your product can fill? Finding what unique appeal your product has will help you reach the right customers.
Check the Competition
Another great way to identify your target audience is to look at who your competitors are selling to. You may find an entire demographic that you are not reaching. This can also help you identify the types of marketing that do and do not work with this particular audience.
Create Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is an idealized customer who allows you to walk through the customer experience to better identify points of contact and marketing opportunities and otherwise enhance the customer experience. The more thought and detail that you add to a buyer persona, the more effective it is. Make several personas, give them names and full backgrounds for the best results.
Stay Up to Date
You must stay up to date with new techniques, methods, and strategies. As you learn more, you can continually update and enhance your buyer personas and your marketing strategy. All industries grow and change, and your business will need to grow and change to keep up.
How to Use Target Audience Information
Once you are fully aware of who exactly your target audience is, you should use that information to help you determine when, where, and how to reach out to them. For example, your main target audience may be more inclined to be responsive to online advertising or prefer one platform over another.
However, you may find your particular target audience is easier reached with direct mail efforts. Knowing your target audience will help you make these determinations. You can also use lead segmentation to direct certain promotions to specific parts of your target audience to capitalize on particular needs or timing.
Engage Your Target Audience
Now that you know your target audience and how to reach them more effectively, it’s time to put your knowledge to work. Use your target audience and buyer personas to make all of your future marketing campaigns far more effective.