How to define your target audience

Before you can build your digital marketing strategy, you must define your target audience – this is vital to business success.

But what is a target audience, and how will you define yours?

A target audience is a group of people or a market segment that your products and services are aimed at. This segment of people will have some very unique and specific pain areas for which your products or services would present the perfect solution.

When operating on a budget to increase sales through various efforts, defining your target audience becomes crucial. Reaching the right set of people at the right time, with the right combination of your offerings is what will help increase your profits. That’s where this article will come in handy. We’ve compiled 5 easy steps to help you define your target audience quickly and efficiently.

Know your existing customers

In order to define your target audience, you need to first look at your existing customers. When designing your business and its offerings, you might have identified certain pain areas that various market segments are facing. Consider this:

Which of these market segments actually went ahead and bought your solutions?
What are the challenges or pain areas they faced, that were overcome with your solutions?

You will most likely find the answers to these questions in your existing customer base. If you’ve just started your business and don’t have much customer data to look at, you can still define your target audience based on your idea of an ideal customer.

Review your product or service

Once you’ve broadly identified the market segment your target audience comes from, you need to take a look at the solutions you’re offering to them.

Make a quick list of some immediate and long-term benefits gained as a result of the unique features of your offerings. Once you’re ready with this list, answer the following questions:

Are the benefits of your offerings important to your target audience in achieving their individual or business goals?
What are the features/benefits where your offerings are falling short?
Can this segment afford your products and services?

You could even do a quick search on Google to find out if the target audience that you’ve defined is having any major challenges which your offerings can solve; something that your business has never made known about its ability to do so.

Identify the demographics of your target segments

Demographics cover factors such as age, gender, location, income level, educational background, occupation, ethnic background, etc. of your ideal customer.

While targeting everybody across the globe can be your business goal, it’ll be difficult to reach this goal right away. Therefore, it is important to understand the demographics of your target market segments. This way, you can then customize your marketing, one demographic at a time.

Make it personal

Personalize your marketing efforts by understanding the personality traits of your ideal customer, such as:

What is their general attitude?
What factors would most definitely motivate them in making certain choices/decisions?
What is their value system based on?
What is their most preferred channel of communication?
Are they active on social media? If yes, on what platforms?

Once you have an idea of their personality, understand how these tie into their lifestyle. When is your target audience most likely to buy your product or service? What are the features that they will primarily look out for? What platform do they use when searching for options?

Answers to these questions will help you personalize your content so as to be more relatable to your ideal customer’s challenges.

Evaluate your decision

Deep down, we’re all skeptics at heart when it comes to change. We second-guess our choices and decisions most of the time. Something similar might happen once you’ve narrowed down on specific segments by defining your target audience. So take a deep breath and evaluate your decision.

Are there enough people that fit into this defined target segment?
Is your product or service solving a pain area that is persistently creating hurdles for them?
Have you understood what motivates them to make certain types of decisions or choices?
Will they be able to afford your offerings?
Are they accessible through the platforms where you’re present? If not, do you know where you can reach them?

If you’re satisfied with the answers to these questions, you have successfully defined your target audience. Take a leap of faith and start marketing to this segment. Analyze the results a few weeks or months later, depending on your offerings, and modify your target audience as and when required.

Defining your target audience is a very important starting point for your digital marketing campaign. There are, however, other factors you must consider as well. Read up on some digital marketing basics to guide you as you launch your digital marketing campaign.

At Them You & Me, we help you plan your digital strategies so that your offerings to your target audience are relevant. If you need our help, do get in touch!