You may think a target audience is a vague group of people who may be interested in your product or service, and you may guess who these people are. But your target audience should be specific, and you should know detailed information about them, such as their characteristics.
Demographics is a good start; this is how you would describe the group of people you consider to be your target audience. Their age, gender, occupation, and education level would play a big part in collating your audiences’ information.
We’ve already mentioned demographics being key here, but what about psychographics and location? It’s all good having the type of person you’re targeting, but everyone has different interests and are in various places.
What would be useful is to make a list of interests your ideal audience would have, personas would come in handy here. If we created a persona for our perfect customer, it would give us an excellent base to start. Who we’re targeting, where they are and what they like.
Are you targeting the right people for your product or service?
After creating our target audience’s personas, I’d like to mention a few tips on getting to know them.
Data analysis is perfect, you may think this is a super boring job, but you could learn a lot from analysing old and new data from surveys and focus groups. You may be able to find some data online, but sometimes it’s best to create your own, this way you know it’s exactly what you need.
One key thing is that you should listen to your audience, monitor any feedback, comments and engagement you receive and take it on board.
You may think this one is obvious, and you’d be surprised how little people know about their competitors, but you must monitor your competitor activities and keep track of who is engaging with them.
Segmentation
Also, know as subgroups, segmentation is required when we have more than one audience group. Segmenting our audience into subgroups or subcategories, and following the steps to get to know each category, would give us a clear direction on how to target them.
Particularly businesses with a variety of products or services, it’s likely they will have many categories. They may want to segment these categories based on their age, for example, a skincare brand may have a selection of products for women of all ages, they would need to ensure they are targeting the right age group with the right product.
Messaging
How do you talk to your audiences? Do you create all of your literature and target everyone with the same message? Or do you speak to different audiences in a different tone of voice with different messages?
If it’s the latter then you’d be correct, it is challenging targeting specific people with targeted messages and tone of voice, but when you get the messaging right, it’s worth it.
If you’re not talking directly to someone, then nobody is going to listen.
Are you choosing the right marketing channels for your business
You should have a pretty good understanding of your target audience regarding demographic and psychographic after researching your audience’s behaviours, segmenting them into groups, having a clear understanding of your messaging and how you would like to talk to these groups.
So you may already have a clear direction on what marketing channels you wish to use to get your messages to your audience. If you don’t, it can be pretty daunting; when I talk about marketing channels, they are any method or platform used to market a product or service to consumers.
Just to name a few, you have social media, email marketing, traditional print, SEO, PPC, website and referrals. The worst thing to do is try and attempt all of these because they’re all specialist areas requiring a lot of attention. You need to understand where your customers are to choose the right channels. For example, is your audience young? Would they be using social media? And if so, which channels would they be using? Instagram and Tiktok, maybe?
Lots to think about, I would suggest choosing 2 or 3 channels and mastering those channels before expanding out to others and becoming overwhelmed.
Talk to your audience
I’m not talking about your messaging or tone of voice. I mean, really talk to your customers, ask them how they are, get to know them, build relationships. These are the people who will get you to your goals, so you need their feedback.
I mentioned this previously but the more feedback, the better; regardless if it’s not what you want to hear, take it as constructive criticism. If you’re doing something wrong, how will you know about it unless you ask the question?
Online surveys are great for this reason, and committed customers will gladly give you the guidance you need to fine-tune your product or service.
Don’t be scared; ask the question.
Did you catch our last blog post on Strategic Marketing? find it here.
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