Marketing 101: Your Target Audience
“If you try to sell to everyone, then you’ll end up selling to no one.”
Your target audience – a concept you likely learned about early on as a marketer, but one that should never slip your mind.
A target audience is a specific group of people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. Consumers are constantly bombarded with messages every day, so your marketing message will end up getting lost if you are not reaching the right people. This is why identifying and reaching your target audience is essential for every business.
You can ask yourself these questions to help understand who your target audience is:
Who is buying this product/service?
Who could benefit from purchasing this product/service?
To really nail down who your target audience is, you can lay out some similar characteristics that you find in your current customers or those you want to reach. These characteristics can be demographics, such as age, location, occupation, and more. They can also be psychographics. Psychographics are how people think, including their attitudes, goals, interests, and more.
Developing a persona is also beneficial in pinpointing your target audience. Personas are fictitious characters created to mimic a real customer in order to humanize the segments in consideration of a target audience. Creating a persona profile can help you understand and visualize who your audience really is. Giving your target buyer a name, face, personality, and more may be a helpful strategy for you. It is not uncommon for you to come up with multiple personas. A good practice is asking yourself, “If my brand were a person, who would they be?”
Understanding your target audience will help you develop the right marketing messages. The reason that people make purchases is typically to fulfill their wants or needs. A marketer’s goal is to get inside the buyer’s head and understand their motivations behind their purchases. So, understanding your target audience helps you better market your product or service to them.
Defining your target audience is a crucial marketing strategy that your business must be doing. If you are having trouble identifying or reaching your target audience, LTD Connect can help. Our HITCH technology helps you target the right audience with the right message on the right device at the right time. Learn more about HITCH here and reach out to us today if you want to connect your business with more customers.