People need to be aware of the buying process and make sure they’re getting a personalized customer experience. Marketers need to create targeted, personalized experiences for people if they want to beat out their competition. If you know your buyer impirately, you can make better decisions about how to reach them and when. So what is a perfect buyer? And how do you find yours?
What Is a Target Audience?
Your target audience is the group of people who are most likely to want your product or service and should be targeted by your marketing efforts. More than $37 Billion is wasted in advertising spend each year from ads that fail to engage. This can be solved with our “The Waste in Advertising” White Paper, which takes just 5 seconds to download.
Depending on what you sell, your target audience might be more niche or broader. For example, if you were a shoe vendor your target audience would likely be more broad, since men, women and children all wear shoes. However if you sold antiques only then your market is more niche due to the older population that typically patronizes this type of shopping. In this case, consider targeting elite athletes. If you take a look at their profiles, you’ll notice that they often express interest in stamina-building activities such as running or marathons. A good first step is to determine your target audience and make sure you’re focusing on things they’ll want to buy. Then, once you’ve defined your message, you can zero in on the channels they like (graphic design, video content, etc.)
Examples of a Target Audience
Target audiences are made up of specific groups of people, such as men, women, teens or children. Some genera interests may be reading, running or soccer for example. Personas can help advertisers investigate relevant magazine titles in this group or identify other media to promote products relevant to this demographic.
Why You Should Know Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is a key to success for any marketer, as it defines marketing plans and strategies. While you might want to reach as many people as possible and get the most bang for your buck, Super Bowl ads are really expensive. Knowing your target audience will help reach the right people; i.e., those that are interested in your product. If you’ve picked a publication or TV show with a high number of viewers, then you can be confident that only 20% of them will actually click on your advertisement. For example, if you sell running shoes, ads in running magazines may be a better fit for your target audience. Marketing ROI depends on selecting the right media to spread your message.
Understanding your target audience can not only increase your return on investment, but it can help you personalize your business and have a much better understanding of what the people who care about it would like to see. You can develop creative that speaks to specific personas, and brands that resonate with your target audience. This is especially important at a time where consumers expect every ad to be personalized and highly targeted. Of all of the online experiences consumers get, personalized ones rank as the most convincing. That’s according to a recent study from our blog and 80 percent of respondents agree.
Types of Target Audiences?
Target audiences can be segmented differently, such as by curiosity, location, or interests. Let’s take a look at some examples:
Interest
Separate groups out based on their various interests, including hobbies and entertainment preferences. This can help you make data-driven, highly personalized messaging that allows you to connect with your audience in meaningful ways that can help drive brand loyalty.
Purchase Intention
One way to increase your online sales is by targeting certain groups of people who are looking for a specific type of product. For example, you can upload discounts and other offers to get a new entertainment system or car. This information will help you understand the pain points of your audience so that you can create more targeted content.
Subcultures
subcultures refer to groups of people with shared interests, such as music genres or entertainment fandoms. When you understand your target audience’s motivations, you could get more of a sense of what marketing campaigns people might respond to.
What is The Difference Between Target Audience and Target Market
A target market is the set of potential customers that a company may reach with its marketing campaigns to sell its products or services. A target audience is the group of people that a brand targets with their ads. This makes them an even more specific subset of a target market.
Returning to the running shoe example, Marathon runners are your target market – but what if you were offering a deal at your Boston location? The target audience for an ad promoting the sale would be prospective runners in the Boston Marathon, not all marathon runners.
“Target audience” and “target market” are often used interchangeably, but they do have some differences. Target market is just a subgroup of your target audience.
Important Roles of the Target Audience
It’s important to understand your target audience for marketing purposes. You get this by looking beyond demographics, and examining the role they play in the customer journey. These roles can typically be divided into the following categories:
The Decision Maker: In the vast majority of cases the decision maker and supporter are different people. The decision maker is usually only someone who agrees with a purchase decisions but they still have their own opinion on it. Old Spice realised that their old campaigns were not catering to consumers anymore and changed their strategy, which resulted in a successful turnaround of the company’s marketing strategy. The company wanted to update their branding to better suit a younger generation of consumers. The team researched and found out that men were the ones ultimately wearing their product, but women were making the purchases. To make things easier for them, their creative team decided to focus on female target audiences.
The Supporter: The influence plays a major part in driving sales so it is important to know how your supporters are feeling about an item. For instance, a child could be influenced that they want something for Christmas. This is why it’s so important to create messaging that speaks to both of these audiences.
5 Ways to Determine Your Target Audience
There is no target audience. You should spend time analyzing data, evaluating current buyers and purchase trends and optimize as new information is revealed.
The following steps should help you identify your target audience:
1. Carry out client interviews and analyze your customer base
One of the best ways to understand your target audience is to look at who already buys your product or service. Learn about your customers by what social networks they use, where they live, and what their interests are. You can also take advantage of customer surveys to find out more detail.
2. Conduct market research and identify industry trends
It can be helpful to look at your industry’s market research to see where the gaps in service are. Ensure that you address any area that could negate your product’s value. It is important to take some time to follow trends relating to your market to see where they are focusing their efforts. You might also want to narrow what makes your product unique and focus on this.
3. Analyze Competitors
Marketers can use data to see how the competition targets your customers. Which channels are they using? Whether online or offline, it’s important to focus on who you want to influence in the first place.
4. Create Personas
Creating personas is a useful way to refine your target market and define the groups that it consists of. Personas help you understand the general demographics, personalities and needs of your target consumers. This is helpful for products that will affect a wide range of audiences. For example, “Fran First-time Runner” speaks to a different set of needs than “Sam Seasoned Pro”. You need to create personas based on surveys, digital engagements, and any other information you can pull from to get a better picture of the type of customer you’re trying to reach. This is just a short list of example topics that might be relevant for people in our target group. Marketers can go with one topic, like their work area, or make a selection between three and five topics.
5. Define Who Your Target Audience Isn’t
Whilst there will be consumers who are close to your target demographic but still won’t act on a brand’s messaging, the odds are usually stacked in the favour of any business. When writing for the public, the best thing to do is to ensure you identify your target audience and write in a way that resonates with them. Don’t just assume that everyone should enjoy your work. Is your core demographic women, or women between the ages of 20 and 40? Consider what this will do to your advertising budgets–you don’t want to spend money on segments that won’t provide a return.
As marketers, it’s crucial to totally understand your target audience and how to reach them. However, don’t forget about other possibilities – there may be more opportunities in the marketplace. If bands need to move to a new position, they may find a better connection with a different demographic. There may be unique cases, that are not yet being considered, for products in your company. When combining target audiences with analytics tools it is possible to identify some new use cases.