While it’s no secret that finding your target audience is the first step in marketing your product or service, many companies struggle to find their customers. In fact, half the marketing campaigns don’t even reach their target audiences. Thus, a brand must know who it is preparing a marketing strategy for. What does that group want? How can you satisfy them?
Knowing these answers will help you create an effective marketing strategy and avoid wasting time and resources on tactics that don’t work. Keep reading to find out how to identify your target market and use this information to reach potential customers.
Why Is It Important to Find Your Target Market?
Identifying your target audience is one of the most critical steps in creating a successful marketing campaign. After all, you can’t sell anything if you don’t know who you’re selling to.
Here are some reasons you need to identify your target audience.
Allows Smarter Marketing
According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are likely to shop from brands that provide relevant recommendations and offers. But, for example, if you’re marketing your product or service to a millennial, you won’t have much luck using a direct-mail campaign.
On the flip side, if you’re marketing to an older demographic, you’ll want to avoid using Snapchat as your primary platform.
Smartphones are ubiquitous among millennials, while direct mail is nearly irrelevant to them. However, this same group of people is far more likely to respond to a Snapchat message than their elders. The key here is understanding which platforms your audience is using.
Boosts Sales
It shouldn’t be a no-brainer that understanding your target audience leads to increased sales.
By understanding who your ideal customer is, what they want and need, and how they like to be communicated with, you can create a marketing campaign that will likely resonate and result in a sale.
Influences Product Development
When you become familiar with your target audience, you also understand their struggles, pain points, and needs. It allows you to develop products that directly address these issues.
For example, suppose you run a cosmetics company and want to develop a new line of products. If your target audience is young women, you might focus on creating affordable and easy-to-use products.
However, if your target audience is older women, you’ll want to create more luxurious and sophisticated products since they can likely afford higher prices.
Helps You Develop a Unique Selling Proposition
Your unique selling proposition (USP) sets your product or service apart from your competitors. It’s what makes you special and worth buying from.
For example, Toms is a shoe company with a USP of giving away a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased. This simple but powerful message has helped the company become one of the most well-known brands in the world.
You can only build a unique USP if you know what will speak to your target customers.
Types of Target Markets
The most common types of target markets are geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral. It all comes down to your segmentation strategy.
- Geographic Segmentation: In this type of segmentation, businesses target customers based on location. For example, a company may target people who live in cold-weather climates with their product.
- Demographic Segmentation: Demographic segmentation is one of the most popular types of market segmentation. In this segmentation, you define your customer base based on factors like age, gender, income, occupation, education, and marital status.
- Psychographic Segmentation: Psychographic segmentation is a bit more complicated than the other types of segmentation since you target customers based on lifestyle, values, personality, and interests.
- Behavioral Segmentation: In this case, you target customers based on their purchase behavior, such as their buying habits, brand loyalty, and willingness to try new products.
How to Identify Your Target Market
Now that you know the different types of target markets, it’s time to learn how to identify your target market. Here are some methods:
Analyze Your Product/Service
Analyzing your product might be the most organic way to identify your target market. After all, it’s your product, and you should understand who would need or want it. Here’s how to ace it:
- List the features of your product. Let’s say your product is a skincare cream. The features of the cream might be that it’s organic, has SPF 30, and is suitable for sensitive skin.
- Then, list the benefits of those features. The benefits of your product include that it’s gentle on the skin, protects against sun damage, and is good for those with sensitive skin.
- Next, match the benefits with customer needs and wants. In this example, anyone with sensitive skin or excessive sun exposure would want this product.
- Finally, determine the demographic most likely to have these needs and wants. In this case, it’s most likely women of all ages looking for a gentle skincare cream.
While this might seem a bit general, it can give you a base to start from. You can then use other methods, like market research, to get a more specific idea of who your target market is.
Conduct Market Analysis
The best way to find your target market is by conducting market research. It will give you an overview of your industry and help you identify trends.
You can use surveys, interviews, focus groups, or secondary data to gather information about your target market. Doing this will allow you to create buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customer.
For instance, if you’re selling a skincare product, your buyer persona may be a 25-year-old woman concerned about her skin’s health. But if your skincare is focused on anti-aging, your buyer persona may be a 45-year-old individual starting to see wrinkles.
When conducting market analysis, keep the following in mind:
- Don’t assume anything. Instead, use data to back up your hypotheses.
- Be prepared to pivot. As your research progresses, you may find that your original expectations were wrong.
- Collect product feature insights. These will be useful when you start developing your product.
Examine Your Current Customer Base
Who is buying your products or services? Why do they need your product? Take a look at your current customer base and try to identify patterns.
You can use this information to segment your market and find other potential customers. For example, if you sell skincare products and most of your customers are women in their 20s, you can target other women in their 20s who may be interested in your product.
Watch Your Competition
Sure enough, you’re competing with another business because they’re targeting the same market as you. Keep an eye on your competition and see how they market their product.
You can learn a lot from them, such as what type of language they use, what type of content resonates with their audience, and what kind of campaigns are successful.
Now, you have two ways to approach this.
You could either learn from their strategies and try to better them in your capacity. Or, you can find a niche market your competition is overlooking to get an edge in the market.
Use Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to identify your target market. Statista data shows that 93% of the marketers use Facebook globally, while 78% also use Instagram. Other popular social media platforms include LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.
You can learn a lot about your target market from social media. For example, you can use Facebook’s Audience Insights tool to learn more about your target market.
Likewise, Twitter’s Advanced Search can help you find tweets from people in your target market. You can also use hashtags to see what kind of conversations are happening around your industry or what’s currently trending.
Use SEO Tools for Site Visitor Analysis
If you have enough visitors to your website, they can give you an insight into your target market. Various SEO tools, such as Google Analytics and Moz, can help you track your website’s traffic and analyze your site visitors.
The data you gather from these tools can help you identify your target audience. For example, you can learn their location, age, gender, interests, and even the type of device they use to visit your website.
Likewise, you can use SEO tools to analyze your competitors’ website traffic. The data you gather can help you understand the target market in your niche.
What’s Next?
After identifying your target market, it’s time to start marketing your product or service to them. You can use various marketing channels, such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and advertising.
Twitter, Facebook, mobile, and content marketing seem to be the top choice for most marketers in the US. Likewise, the influencer marketing revenue has reached $6.5 billion worldwide, making it an attractive option for companies that want to reach a younger audience.
The most important thing is to create a marketing strategy that resonates with your target market. Remember that your target market is constantly evolving, so you must regularly update your marketing strategy to stay ahead of the curve.
Recommended readings:
E-Commerce SEO: How to Build More Backlinks to Product Pages
What is Content Creation and What Does it Mean for Businesses?