Marketing budgets are limited. Are you targeting yours in the right direction? Or are you working without a map?
Knowing your target audience is a key part of planning your marketing. Without it, whether you are selling dog food, digital marketing or diamonds, you risk taking some expensive wrong turns, just like heading on a road trip without a destination planned.
It’s ok to want EVERYONE to be interested in your product or service. They aren’t though. And that means you can have the best marketing ever, you still won’t get a sale from them. Marketing to your target audience – the people who are likely to buy is what gets you results.
Before we look at the benefits, here’s a quick primer on what we mean when we talk about target markets and target audiences.
Target market – the wide group who might use a product or service. If you run a jewellery store, your target market would be everyone who might want to buy a piece of jewellery with a budget that meets your store’s price.
Target audience – the smaller group or groups within that market. Usually, a business will have more than one target audience. For example, the jewellery store’s target audiences might include:
- women buying jewellery for themselves
- men buying jewellery as a present for someone significant
- couples buying jewellery for a special occasion like wedding rings
What are the benefits of defining your target audience?
You can adapt your language and sales pitch accordingly
When you are trying to talk to everybody you often become so bland you end up talking to no one. Having target audiences defined helps you create marketing collateral, ads and sales pitches that speak directly to an audience. Once you know your target audiences you can:
- Create different content for different audiences: For example, our jewellery story might create a short piece about the latest styles including a discount code for women buying for themselves who shop regularly. For men buying as a gift, they might create a more comprehensive guide to the basics like the different types of stone cuts or precious metals and which they should choose.
- Use different language depending on your audience. For example, a roofing company might use different language in a piece for homeowners compared to builders, who will already know more about the product.
- Highlight different features or benefits depending on what will appeal to each audience.
You can target the right marketing channels
Just like they talk differently, different audiences show up in different places. For example, if you have a young audience you might find them more on TikTok, whereas older audiences might appreciate more direct marketing like email newsletters or even some traditional marketing routes like radio ads.
You can target paid ads
Paid ads through channels like Google or Facebook give you the chance to target an audience. By narrowing your options to sections that fit your target market, for example in certain age groups or locations, you’ll increase the chances of people clicking on your ad because they are interested in your service and reduces the risk of wasting your budget.
Make your customers feel more valued
When your customers get content or sales pitches that feel relevant, they feel like your business is listening to them and paying attention. This improves your relationship long-term which can increase customer loyalty.
You should get better return on investment
By targeting all of these marketing efforts towards the people who are already likely to be interested in your product or service, you should see a better return on your marketing investment. Firstly because you won’t be wasting valuable marketing dollars in places that clearly aren’t going to be successful and secondly because the people you are marketing to will be more likely to buy your product or service.
Bonus benefit:
Knowing your target audience also helps you to refine your current products or services or introduce new ones that better suit your customers. For example, if you are a digital marketer and you have two audience types – one that wants everything done for them and one that wants to learn marketing skills at the same time, you might introduce a new product that combines marketing with a teaching element for those that want to learn.
How to find your target audience
So now you know why you should have a target audience, how do you create it? First, you need some data.
Look at your current/past customers
The best place to start is to look at current or recent customers. Look for demographic patterns such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Relationship status
- Professional status eg are they employed, business owners, students
- Income – you could also look at their average spend as a customer
And psychological patterns such as:
- What they buy
- When and how often they buy
- What their values are
- What makes them choose the product/service
Look at who interacts with you on social or your website
People who interact with your social media channels or your website haven’t necessarily become customers yet, but they have still shown an interest in your business. Look for the same patterns as with current customers. Looking at which social media sites you get the most traction on can also give you some insight into the type of people interested.
Do a survey
Surveys can be particularly helpful if you are trying to find out more about your audience’s values and interests which can’t always be captured with simple sales or demographic data. Survey your current customers or run polls or surveys on your social media channels to get answers.
Look at your competitors
As with any marketing, it’s worth looking at what your competitors are doing, not so you can copy them, but to see if it provides any useful information. Check out who they are marketing to and see if it fits with your product or service.
Once you’ve got your data you can start grouping your customers into target audiences. Your target audiences may be quite broad, for example, men, aged between 25 and 60 with middle to high income. You may split those into even more targeted groups to help you define your marketing even more.
Here are some examples of how you might group people for our jewellery store:
- Couples buying jewellery for a special occasion such as wedding rings might share similar values. But splitting the group further into different age groups could be useful as older couples, who may be in a second relationship, may be looking for something different to young people newly engaged for the first time.
- Men buying jewellery as a gift might be further split along income levels as they will be able to afford different types of precious stones or metals.
Some people like to create buyer personas for each type. For example “Confused Colin: wants to buy some jewellery for his girlfriend for their anniversary. Willing to spend for a special occasion. Knows she prefers silver but has no idea about which style is best.” This doesn’t work for every business owner though, so if you don’t feel comfortable making personas it’s not critical.
Don’t forget to regularly review your target audiences to ensure you are still meeting their needs and targeting the right people. This is especially important if you make changes in your business such as introducing a new product or service.
Want more great tips for your marketing? Our Digital Marketing Strategy course includes lessons on developing target markets and much more.
