Reaching Your Target Audience

Your target audience is vital to the focus and efficiency of your business. Success depends on knowing who your target audience is, understanding their needs, and knowing effective strategies to target them. Marketing too broadly or to the wrong group wastes valuable time, energy, and money.

Identify Your Target Audience

Before you can reach your target audience, you first have to know who they are. People shop not for products, but for solutions to their problems. If they have dry skin, they buy lotion; if their shoes wear through, they buy new ones. Find the specific problem your product or service alleviates, then identify who suffers most from that problem—those are your most profitable customers.

In terms of demographics, what do they look like? Consider age, gender, employment status, location, education level, average income, and occupation. Look at who your competitors are marketing to, and determine if there are more niche markets you should study. Use these factors to build a comprehensive profile of your target audience.

Once you have a group identified, research their purchasing trends, both in general and in terms of your specific market. Establish what causes them to seek a competitor’s service over yours, as well as the outside factors that influence their decision to buy, like holidays or weather.

Understand Your Target Audience

At best, misunderstanding your target audience can be off-putting; at worst, it comes off as disingenuous and untrustworthy. Conducting market research is a good place to start. Good advertising involves listening to your audience’s needs, so talk directly with members of your target demographic. Understand what they want out of your product, and you’ll understand how to advertise to appeal to that want.

Don’t neglect your market’s past, either; understanding how target audiences for your service have shifted over the years can offer insight on future trends. If your market is in the process of changing, you’ll need to build your advertising strategy to account for shifting perceptions. If you’re an already-established company, you’ll need to adapt your current strategy to include these new demographics.

Once you understand them, you can begin to build your business’s personality. Social media is designed for interaction—how will you interact with your customers? What slogan will make your target audience say, “This company understands what I need”? People are more likely to buy a product when it appeals to their personality, and with younger generations especially, the morals of the companies they support matter.

Know Where Your Target Audience Is

Identify where your target audience spends their time and money online. People of every demographic use social media, but a 20-year-old college student will typically frequent different platforms than a 60-year-old teacher. Don’t waste resources maintaining profiles on platforms your target audience doesn’t use. Customer engagement should be focused on the places they’re most active.

While much of marketing is done online, don’t forget to consider where your audience is spending their time physically. Community events, trade shows, and parades, are great places to advertise.

With an endless variety of options to match your target audience’s needs and personality, promotional products are the perfect way to get your company’s name out there. Whoever you’re trying to reach, FaceTime Business Resources has what you need.

Leave a Reply