7 Tips That Will Help Define Your Target Audience
As a business, carrying out a target market and audience analysis to know your ideal customer is critical if you want to increase sales while cutting down on marketing investments. As the saying goes, “If you try selling to everyone, you will end up selling to no one.” This very popular sales saying is one that every business owner should live by. Except if there’s no oxygen on earth again and your product is the oxygen that every human being must buy if they want to live, then your product is not for everyone.
Before creating a service or product for specific persons, you have to find who they are and where they are so you can eliminate the frustrations of not making sales regularly. This is defined as your target audience.
What is the meaning of a target audience?
Your target audience is embedded in your target market. It is very common for people to interchange these two terms which mean quite different things. The target market is the wider range of people that your products or services would be useful to while target audience is a specific niche in that target market that you have identified and want to focus on.
Carrying out a target market and audience analysis to know your ideal customer is critical if you want to increase sales while cutting down on marketing investments. The help of an SEO marketing agency will come in handy, but you can also consider the following seven tips to help you to define your target audience.
1. Know why people should buy from you
There should be a reason why people should buy from you. Knowing this would help you narrow down the kind of customers you should be looking out for. Are people buying because of the price? Are they buying because yours is closer to them than other competitors offering the same products or services? Are they buying because it appeals to their gender? Or does your product appear to be bought often by people within a certain age? These are some of the questions you can try to answer to get more insight about who your target audience is. This is not to say that people who are not in this target audience will not buy from you but you will be able to focus more of your resources in getting these ones rather than trying to convince others to buy because they aren’t your target audience.
2. Spy on strong competitors in your niche
You are not the only one offering the same products or services to a shared selected group. This is why it’s vital to find out who your competitors are; both the direct competitors and the indirect ones. Then carry out a competitive analysis on them to discover who they target. If you have not started making sales in your business and you are unsure about who your target audience is, start by carrying out a comprehensive competitive analysis on all competitors offering similar or the same products or services. This would open your eyes to an even more niche target audience that you are probably aren’t aware of; which your products or services would be of need to.
3. Make a features and benefits list
So you have a product or service that is great but you can’t pin exactly who it would be of use to? Create a features list and a benefits list. What are the uniques features of your products or services? How do the features benefit anyone that uses it? Doing this gives you a faint picture about who your target audience is, then you can further drill down on the specifics of this target audience to ensure that they are likely to want it and have the capacity to buy it.
4. Create a faint buyer picture
Once you are able to create a faint picture of your potential buyer by creating a features list and benefits list, you can begin to analyze the demography; What is the location of the potential buyer? What is the age range? Is it a specific gender? Are they married or single? Employed, unemployed or self-employed? What is their educational background? What is their monthly income range?
5. Define the interests of potential buyers
Interest is key to what drives us as humans. The things that interest us are likely to have more room in our minds than other things that don’t. This is why it is essential to know the interests of your potential buyers. Having a clear understanding of the demographics of these potential buyers makes it easier for you to list out their interests. For instance, a person else who lives in a suburban area with a family of six surviving on a monthly income of 100 dollars is less likely to be interested in travel offers, real estate business, business investments, having groceries delivered to the home etc.
6. Know customers communicate
Information and communication are essential to us as humans. We are driven to communicate by the kind of information that we have access to. Your potential buyers are going to go somewhere to access the kind of information that they want to get, and you need to know where such people go to. It would give you a broader view of the possible things that goes on in their minds and possible questions that they might be asking in such places. If you sell products for babies online, people are interested in seeing what the product looks like and possibly an image of real babies wearing it. They are likely to go to Instagram (which now offers a direct link to shop for the product) or perform a Google search with short or long tail keywords. This means that your target audience is people who can afford to subscribe to the heavy data that Instagram consumes and they are learned enough to navigate through the Google search results pages.
7. Make use of free audience targeting tools
There are quite a number of free and paid tools that you can use to help you generate an accurate target audience like Facebook Audience Insight which provides in-depth analysis of people who follow your page. You can start with this insight and build on it, especially if you are keen on understanding your online target audience.