Why Every Business Needs a Clear Target Audience

It is not that hard to establish a brand. But running a business and developing in the long-term doesn’t seem so easy. So what is next? 

It is not like all your potential and real customers just appear from anywhere. You are the one who should reach the people who are most likely to engage and seek your offering. Furthermore with the big competition on the market and the economic uncertainty nowadays you should constantly review the ones that are most likely to seek your product and services. Without regularly revisiting their target audience businesses tend to fail, decline their sales or stagnate at best.

Building a brand and turning it into a meaningful organization that generates revenue and grows is a very long journey. But what is really a target audience and how you can define it? 

Business owners tend to make assumptions about who is their target audience based on their wishes. Actually, the target audience is a group of potential users that want to engage with your business. They are likely united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviour. Targeting your audience must be based on research and your data should contain concrete information to validate the identified audience.

Why Do you Need To Define A Clear Target Audience?

To find the right channels
Now when you know the characteristics of your audience it will be easier for you or your marketing agency to reach them. For example, if your target is males between 30 and 55 years interested in cloud computing, you will spend time advertising and creating content in channels which are used mainly by them. For example Twitter, LinkedIn or specific websites like TechTarget or ZDNet. When you dive even deeper into the demographics, nationality, interests, hobbies, etc. characteristics of your audience for sure you will save a lot of precious time, effort and money.

“$37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience.” – a white paper says

To market in social networks

With social media, it is easy to reach and connect with the specific groups that show interest in your brand. As you develop your target audience definition, you can get highly specific. Starting with the people who are already buying your product and/or following your account, you can excel in reaching those potential clients with the characteristics’ you previously established. The more specific you are, the better results you will get. Make sure that you include age, language, interests, location, specific technical skills and interests. B2B businesses even consider the sizes of businesses they want to approach and the exact people who are making the buying decisions (the CEO, IT director, social marketing manager, etc.) – the so-called account-based marketing. Social media can be even a way to double-check your research because based on the statistics provided you can improve your listing and go ahead one step in your journey of being recognized among your clients. This is especially important at a time when consumers expect every ad to be personalized and highly targeted.

To develop your product 

Marketing demand and customers are changing and so should your product. Reaching those who tend to be connected with your brand might turn into the development and improvement of your products. You can learn from your target audience if you try to understand them and interact with them. In fact, 80% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized interactions.

Meet your audience’s demand by analyzing: 

• Market demand
• Purchase motivations and influences
• Gap analysis
• Optimal price points
• Existing buying behaviour
• Customer trade-offs
• Purchase triggers
• Customer and purchase journeys

To improve your business performance

If you choose the customer-centric approach you will not only retain and make feel special those who buy from you but you will develop your strategy to suit your customers. Overall aren’t all successful businesses structured to meet their clients’ demands?
 

Ways to determine your target:

1.Search among your base

Probably you already identified a group of people who buy your product. Try analyzing them deeply: how old they are, where they live, what are their interests, are they decision makers or supporters, try even to search specific events and pages they follow. This is how you will know where to search for audiences with similar interests and characteristics and you will reach more people.

2. Conduct Market Research

Dive deeper into the obstacles that don’t help your business to grow. Search trends of similar products so you can fill the gaps in your business strategy. After that, you can focus what are the specifics of your product that bring your customers additional value.

3. Take a look at your competitors

Always take a look at your competitors. Even if your competitive product is more worthy. They might have used some online and offline channels that got them clients that still don’t know about your products. Search for them if they show interest in similar products to your offerings.

4. Specify your typical clients

The idea of that is to have a very clear idea of the people you want to reach. This is how you will get a general idea of the demographics, personalities and needs of your audience. Such a complete view of the buyers can be defined based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from. 

5. Define who you don’t need to reach

For sure there will be people who are really close to your clients by some characteristics of your target. Still, you have to define them so you don’t take effort trying to reach them without any beneficial result for both them and your business.

6. Optimize often

Once you gathered information about your target audience you can upgrade your list and you should continuously revise it. When you interact with them you will have a clear idea of who they are and how you can gather more information and reach more similar people.

7. Use Google Analytics

The tool offers a lot of data about those who visit your website and exactly what kind of content they are interested in. Based on Google Analytics you can make many data-driven decisions and improve your connectivity with the audience.

Creating a target audience is essential for knowing where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. This helps you to understand who your target customer is and what they care about. Otherwise, sales is an uphill battle. You can’t be everything to anyone. It is easy to sell only after the upfront work of getting to know your customers. This becomes a solid foundation that you can use to grow your brand. Specifying why your business is essential just for the specific group of interest will be beneficial both for the development of your product and your business.