Identify Target Audience: How? What is it?
A key aspect of successfully selling a product is sending the right messages to the right people. These right people are often termed as the ‘target audience’.
Knowing your target audience is considering various factors like demographics, consumer behaviors, psychographics, needs, and pain points. It’s like connecting several different pieces to complete a puzzle. Here, this puzzle is a strong marketing strategy. Also, Identify target audience to refine marketing campaigns and boost return on investment effectively.
In today’s blog post, instead of dealing with this concept as a general notion, we’ll approach it in-depth, related to today’s global market to help marketers, and brands understand their future customers better.
What is Target Audience?
Consumers who are highly receptive (currently or later) to buying your products or services are known as the target audience. A target audience usually can be at the following purchasing stages-
- Aware and ready to buy
- Aware and not ready to buy
- Unaware of the product or service
The focus of the target audience is not restricted to just products or services but also themes, ideas, and messages. Identify target audience to ensure your marketing efforts reach the right customer segment effectively.
Ideally, a specific group of people fits within the definition of the target audience; there’s hardly a product or service that appeals to a universal target audience.
However, some products come close to having a vast target audience. Basic necessities like food, water, and basic clothing have a target audience encompassing a supermajority population.
Types of Target Audience
Imagine a car – four wheels, steering wheel, windshield, and other common attributes. But within this category, there are many different types: sedans, hatchbacks, SUVs, electric cars, and so on. Likewise, within a target niche, you’ll find different types of specific personas, which are:
Demographics
A grown man may not be interested in a balance bike he used to never get off as a toddler or preschooler. Different times have different needs. And, this is what demographics is about! Identify target audiences to tailor products, services, and messages that meet their specific needs.
Demographics are statistical details about any group of people. It is the most common category of target audience. You can identify them based on age, gender, location, and marital status.
So, it might be possible that your product is exclusively made for girls below the age of 18 residing near coasts or for a veteran old man managing his real estate rentals in a busy city. The needs and demands of these two age groups are very unlikely to be the same.
The other demographic factors are income, generation, education, language spoken, etc.
Psychographics
Psychographics is what’s inside the demographics. The former dives deeper into the beliefs, lifestyles, habits, interests, and values of a target audience.
Like, a fitness supplement company can have unique tailored strategies in order to target fit people who need to maintain their physique and move closer towards achieving more shredded results. On the other hand, they craft a strategy who are at either side of equilibrium – thin and obese people, by introducing weight gain and loss products respectively.
While demographics is the “who”, psychographics is the “why” in consumer behavior.
The other most common elements in psychographics are goals, hobbies, passions, guiding principles, and more.
Behavioral
Every successful brand strategy begins with a clear plan to identify target audience profiles. One important way to directly segment your target audience is by focusing on the engagement activity. This gives an insight into what the user wants.
Businesses can collect these behavioral data from sources like:
Website Analytics: Metrics like page views, CTR, bounce rate, unique visitors, heatmaps, form submissions, etc.
Purchase History: Tracking the consumers’ repeated buying behavior like the product type, frequency, and average order value.
App Analytics: Tracking user behavior on mobile apps like in-app purchases, features used, etc.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: CRMs store customer information, including past interactions with customer service or support, which can reveal preferences and buying habits.
Social Media Engagement: Businesses can track how users interact with their social media content, such as likes, shares, and comments, to understand their interests and preferences.
Purchase Intention or Buyer Intent
The journey from taking the first step towards making a purchase to actually buying it varies every time.
For example, to buy an expensive product, an average consumer might be conducting research for months, while he/she may take a much shorter timeframe to purchase a cheaper product or service.
Purchase intention lets you know the likelihood or how close they are at the final step of buying.
It can be further classified into two categories:
High Purchase Intention: They are actively moving into the next stages of the sales funnel to actively buy the product or know more about it.
Low Purchase Intention: They are aware of the product but do not show much interest in purchasing the product.
The reason for low purchase intention could be budget, lesser conviction, need for more research, brand perception, limited trust, or being less aware of advantages.
Subculture
A group of people having a mutual interest or shared values comes under this category. Generally, these groups express themselves through music, art, fashion, and activities.
Popular examples of subculture segmentation include:
Metalheads are inclined towards heavy metal music and buy band merchandise, black jackets, and clothing.
Cosplayers who like to don the character they admire from movies, video games, anime, series, or comics.
Climate activists are a global example of a subculture dedicated to protecting the environment by raising awareness and promoting sustainable activities.
Otaku, the people with a strong inclination for manga, anime, and video games. This subculture started in Japan and now has a global presence.
Why is it necessary to Identify target audience?
To identify Target Audience finding the ideal customer profile is the core of any marketing strategy or plan. Without it, the situation may feel like throwing darts in every direction.
Knowing your ideal audience not only saves time from wasting your marketing efforts on the wrong consumers but also makes communication and relationships better with potential customers.
Let’s understand in depth why it’s crucial to know your target audience before laying out a marketing plan –
Targeted Marketing
Having a target audience decides whether you need to set your sights on a broader niche or micro niche. For example, if you are selling jackets your ideal customers will be broad, depending on weather conditions, age, price, brand image, etc.
On the other hand, if your product is racing suits and jackets, the audience will be professional racers, aspiring racers, and sometimes racing fans (who buy replica jackets) where the product is more focused on design, protection, and made of tough material.
Analyzing this deeply must be at the forefront of your marketing strategy can help in setting your foot in the right place and attracting the ideal audience.
Building Relationships
The foundation of a strong business relies on building relationships between buyers and sellers. Businesses to small vendors gain a competitive advantage by selling their product uniquely, having a positive word of mouth, or even due to professional, positive, and transparent behavior when dealing with customers.
When you know the trend of your customers, the work gets easier.
Designing a personalized customer experience becomes easy when you know what your customers are looking forward to and what can really spark their buying interest.
Optimized Marketing Costs
Be it your money, team, or time, every resource is valuable and in marketing, whether you rely on paid ads, organic marketing, or both, planning a precise and direct campaign will result in productive use of resources.
And it all starts with being familiar with who you are going to target.
Knowing your ideal customer profile will keep you on the right track from the beginning, you’ll know what channels to focus on, where you need to go all out, what should be on less priority, and so on.
This strategy will save you on unnecessary spending and at the same let you laser focus on a specific segment, leading to a higher return on your marketing investment (ROI).
Developing Relevant Products
Customers buy from you for the problem you solve and they’ll buy more from you if your product directly addresses their needs.
Imagine a sales guy who deals with more than thirty clients a day. Making cold calls, following up, facing rejections, securing deals, and maintaining data in Excel sheets. This is what his typical office day looks like.
He is one of the top performers among his peers but still, he realizes that the most number of deals he has lost is due to poor communication.
One major reason behind this is not being able to track all the important communications which leads to less personalized nurturing, and ultimately losing the deal.
A tailored solution for such sales reps is Buopso, where one can enter, document, track, and manage important customer data from various sources into a single, accessible view so that no sale gets sabotaged due to the lack of proper customer management.
Conclusion
Target audience gives a pretty good idea of your customers. Whether you have a single channel of audience or multiple, segmenting and tailoring your strategies will keep you ahead of the curve. Identify the target audience using market research tools, surveys, and data analytics for better accuracy.
After you’ve mapped out whom to focus on, you can start building strategies on how to focus. Create enough room for understanding the target audience in your campaign strategy and see the benefits for yourself. Also, Identify the target audience to build meaningful connections and foster long-term relationships with customers.
Also, we have other Resources to look at: What is Consultative Selling? 7 Sales Promotion Techniques to Maximize Conversion Rates What is Sales Enablement? Sales vs Business Development vs Marketing Best Inbound Sales Strategies: Processes and Examples
