Addressing the right audience is perhaps the only important component of communication. Why? Because if you’re not communicating with potential customers, members or supporters, you’re wasting your efforts. The whole aim of marketing is to “get the right message to the right person”. Every entrepreneur knows, regardless of how great your business or product is, you won’t be able to achieve much if you don’t sell the right story to the right target audience.
Why You Need a Target Audience?
Every problem needs a solution. So for your business (product or service) to be successful, you have to consider what issue/problem it’s solving. The real key to successful marketing is targeting. If you assume that just anyone and everyone is your customer, you’ll just be wasting valuable time and money. It will be a wild-goose chase if you talk about music and culture to a tech fanatic crowd.
Thus, bearing the importance of nailing the right target audience, here’s a breakdown of how you can reach them to get across your brand’s ideology and message to them.
Identify Your Target Audience
Before you can reach your prospects, you have to be able to identify them. There are a few ways to identify your target audience. The first is paying attention to your current customers: who are they? What do they have in common? This data can be broken down into demographics:
Age
Occupation
Gender
Income level
Education level
Marital or family status
Location
Once you understand the defining characteristics of your existing customer base, you can go after more people who fit the same mould. Depending on how someone connects with your business, will give you insight into how you can attract a potential, similar target audience base through apt marketing channels. Whether you need to use Facebook ads, a blog, email marketing, or direct mail will be dependent on the demographic study.
Look to the Website and Social Media Analytics:
So, where will you get all of this audience research information? Social media analytics can be a great way of filling in the gaps in your customer analysis. They can also help you understand who’s interacting with your social accounts, and in what capacity – customers, influencers, and so on.
Check out the Competition:
Now that you have fair idea about the target audience base already interacting with your business and buying your products or services, it’s time to see who is engaging with the competition. You won’t be able to get detailed audience research about the people interacting with your competitors, but you’ll be able to get a general sense of the approach they’re practising and whether it’s enabling them to create engagement online/sales.
Be Clear about the Value of your Product or Service:
This comes down to the key distinction all marketers must understand, between features and benefits. Features are what your product is or does. The benefits are the results. If you’re not sure exactly how customers benefit from using your products, why not ask them?
Reaching your target audience can prove to be the pivotal “alas!” moment for your business. Following the above methods will be the perfect start to being able to speak directly to the customer you want to reach to market your service.