No matter what type of business you operate, defining your target audience can be difficult. It’s also a necessary piece of the success of your business.  Why is it so important? Without knowing the people you want to target, you can’t create a successful marketing strategy.   You could have a marketing strategy in place, but it would be very unfocused. When you understand who your audience is, that’s when you can plan where and how you need to market to them.  And focus your efforts on that targeted group of people who will most likely need your product or services.

Here are 4 steps you can use to define your target audience and improve your marketing strategy in the process.

Identify the problems your product or service solves

When you create a business plan it starts with the problem(s) your product or service is going to solve.  These problems are a key piece in defining your target audience.   When you know the problem you can start to understand the type of people your business is going to help.

At Infinite Reach some of our clients don’t have the time or knowledge to focus on SEO or Social Media Management, but they know these are important parts of their strategy.  So, our services take the internet marketing piece off their plate so they can focus on other aspects of their business. It helps solve a business owner’s biggest problem, not having enough time in the day to get everything done.

Determine your Target Audience

The time consuming piece is going out and actually researching the demographics your product or service solves a problem for. You want to start with primary research in the form of surveys, interviews or even questionnaires to get an overall sense of what type of people are interested in your product.  And then from there, pull in some secondary research on demographics and consumer behavior to build a bigger picture of who those people actually are.

Group your Audience into Personas

This keeps the research you’ve done around your target audience top of mind for both you and your team.  So now everyone from your sales team, to marketing to website development knows the type of people who are going to be using your product or service.  And this is going to be important for each of those departments to know.  A web developer needs to know the type of people you want your website to attract and the marketing team needs to know who these people are in order to plan a strategy.

Personas also put the research you’ve done in step two into something more tangible for your team to work off of.  People tend to relate better when you pull out an actual case study of a potential customer than when you hand them a spread sheet with a bunch of numbers on it.  Instead, pull from that data and create actual personas that outline each of the people from your target group.

Persona Example, Source: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/10/content-strategy-questions-answered/

Focus your Marketing Plan around your Target Audience

Now that you understand who your audience is, you can plan a more focused marketing strategy around those people.  You understand who they are, what they want and where you can find them.

With this knowledge you can figure out what types of marketing will resonate the most with them and where you should be spending your marketing dollars. Will they shop online through Pinterest? Or do they still prefer brick and mortar stores?

Now that you understand your target audience learn more on how you can show client appreciation in this new blog post.