Knowing your target audience and creating your customer avatars
The most important thing about your business is your most valuable business asset – your customers. Without customers, you don’t have a business, and you’ll surely fail! Therefore, it’s essential that you know your customers thoroughly. Your customers help shape your business, from how you promote yourself, what you market, your growth strategy, the brand names of your products or services, and even your pricing strategy.
The groups of people who are most likely to become your customers are called your target audience. To be successful, you should clearly define your target audience and keep reevaluating this over time to ensure it is still relevant. Without a clear understanding of your audience, it is pretty much impossible to be successful in marketing, making sales, and building a culture around your brand. Focus your time and energy on nurturing those who are interested in your products and services.
Defining your target audience
To successfully define your target audience you need to know who they are, what they want and why. You can start by investigating who your competitor’s customers are and how they are targeting them.
If you have a new product or service, spend a little time undertaking some online research to see who is asking for something similar to what you are proposing. A great resource for this type of research is Quora – a question-based website.
Doing audience research helps you laser target your marketing efforts and grow a solid brand. Use your research to create clear, customer profiles, how old are they? Where do they live? What do they read? Where do they shop? Sometimes, it helps to give them a name so you can address your communications to a ‘real’ target person.
Why Target Market Is Important in Branding
Knowing your target market and gaining their loyalty and trust is key to reaching your brand objectives. By knowing your target market inside and out, you’ll have the knowledge to successfully achieve your brand marketing goals. You can aid this process by undertaking market research, either face-to-face or via an online survey or questionnaire. Your market research should provide you with the data to reach your target effectively, create a creative message that resonates and generates interest and creates a way of connecting successfully with your audience.
Your brand’s power completely relies on your ability to focus and craft a clear marketing message that will convert prospects into customers. That is why defining your target market will help to strengthen your brand’s overall effectiveness.
Who
The “who” portion of your target audience is a key factor in the success of your business. Your audience can be broken down into many groups: age, location, gender, background, income, and interests. A well-defined target audience should combine a minimum of three of these groups.
What
There are two questions to ask yourself when defining the “what” portion of your target audience:
• What exactly is your target audience looking for that is different from the competition?
• What matters to your target audience?
Knowing the answers to these two questions will help you determine many of your company’s core principles including your value statement, mission, and how you will distance yourself from your competition. Knowing your “what” helps to focus your offerings to your client.
Why
The final step to defining your target audience is your “why”. Why is your product or service necessary? Why will your audience appreciate and value what you have to sell? Why will your audience trust you? Finding your “why” is tricky but you can help the process by answering the following two questions:
• What motivates your target audience to buy from you?
• What concerns could your target audience have about buying from you?
To summarise:
Developing a clear understanding of why people are looking for a product like yours and what could make them hesitate when purchasing it will help your company determine how to position itself in the market.
