Discovering Your Target Audience

“I am sure this product will be used and loved by babies, teenagers, retirees, homeowners, Wall Street, teachers, farmers, stay-at-home-moms, and small-business owners!” When was the last time you made a statement like this?

Can you think of a product that would target all of these audiences? Do you think most companies could afford to market to all of them even if there was such a product? Probably not! That would get time-intensive and expensive very quickly, besides the fact that it would be really difficult to curate copy to grab all of these audiences’ attention at the same time!

In my blog post last week, I talked about what is needed to form a great connection with your clients: discover your target audience, create copy just for them, and maintain a consistent communication schedule. For the next three weeks, I will be digging deeper into each of these three topics. This week I will be giving you four steps to help you discover who your target audience is and interact with them in a way that can grow your brand following and achieve your intended results.

Every company needs to know who their target audience is. This should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. Without knowing who you are trying to reach, how can you connect with them and gain their business?

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” –Benjamin Franklin

Understand Your Need for a Target Audience

Identifying who you want to reach is not about excluding a group but instead focusing on a specific core audience with your branding and marketing dollars. By identifying a target audience, you can be more efficient and effective with where and how you market to them. In turn, this frees up your time and money to increase your customer base by creating new products or by expanding your current services.

Know Your Current Audience

Before you can formulate your ideal customer profile, you must also assess your current situation. Determining who is your current audience will give insight into who you are currently targeting, even if it’s inadvertently. When analyzing your marketing practices, consider who are your current clients, what appeals to them, and why they support you. From this, you can then strategize and determine if you need to tweak your marketing tactics.

Create Your Ideal Customer Profile

After analyzing your current clients, it is time to start developing your ideal customer profile. To create this profile, you need to know the demographics of your intended audience: their age, gender, geographic location, level of education, income, and occupation. In addition, knowing your audience’s values and interests can help you plan how to effectively market to them. Finally, you cannot have a complete ideal customer profile without understanding your audience’s pain points or challenges. Understanding this allows you to target those areas and provide your client with solutions to resolve their pain points.

When creating your profile, you can use the answers to these questions to help you further identify your ideal client:

• How do their values impact their purchasing decisions?
• What makes my company appeal to this particular client?
• How will my service/product fit into their current lifestyle?
• How they will use this product/service?
• What problem or challenge does this solve for them?
• What communication channels or platforms do they use the most?

Research Your Audience

Once you have put in the hard work and time to develop this ideal customer profile, you should compare it to your current audience and determine what needs changed along with what tactics are currently working. During this process, you might even need to employ the use of research.

Research…this word might bring back college memories of pulling all-nighters studying for a huge, upcoming exam while downing countless cups of coffee.

However, research doesn’t have to be that complex or time-consuming. Search for articles, forums, surveys, or blogs about your target audience. Ask your current customers for feedback. These research findings can reveal great insights and new innovative tactics to use in your marketing strategy that you wouldn’t have thought to employ on your own.

Without knowing your target audience, your marketing strategy is not complete. Get a better return on your marketing dollars by creating an ideal customer profile and marketing directly to that profile. If you need help writing copy to appeal to this ideal client, I can help you with that. Reach out to me, and we can discuss how I can help you produce copy that aligns with your marketing strategy and your target audience!