I have always been curious about the psychology behind why people do what they do. When I was a kid, I loved the phrase, “But why?”. That same curiosity has crossed over into my career as a digital marketer. It’s the same common thread as a small business owner. Why does anyone care about my offering? Why would they want to purchase from me?
The reason will become clear once you learn exactly who your target audience is and how to connect with them. Making clear connections between who they are, what problem you are solving, and how you want them to feel after purchasing your product or service will be a no-brainer.
What Is A Target Audience?
Before we get into why it’s essential to know your target audience, you may be scratching your head a tad and asking yourself, what is a target audience? A target audience is people with common similarities, including how or why they would want to purchase your product or service.
A target audience is defined by demographics such as age, gender, location, educational background, career, income, and if they have children living at home. These are the same pieces of information that are captured in our country’s census. Next, target audiences are broken down further by psychographics defined by lifestyle, interests, religious affiliations, dislikes and likes, hobbies, cultural influences, and community affiliations. Then, to further explore your target audience, you would want to include research on their day, places they might frequent, technology usage, and social media habits.
These components make up who you may be targeting with your marketing efforts and are common threads that can help you decide how to approach your target audience and where to find them.
Why Is Knowing Your Target Audience Crucial?
As a business owner, your time is precious. You don’t have time to experiment with messaging that will convert your target audience into sales or search for where to find them in their buyer’s journey. Instead, you have a product or service that could serve a particular type of audience. You know how it can help them, but shouting it into the ether will not reach your target audience.
So how do you get from Point A (having an offer) to Point B (winning the sale)? First, you learn who to target with your marketing messaging, where to find them, and how to squash objections and convert them into buyers. But the first step is understanding who to target your marketing messaging with and what will resonate with your target audience best. Understanding your target audience cuts down on unnecessary time (which = $$$), energy you probably don’t have much of, and brings you closer to closing the deal in a much shorter amount of time.
Additionally, your product might appeal to several different target audiences for various reasons. For example, perhaps you are a bakery that sells fresh baked goods. Your sweet treats might be marketed to women who crave a little dessert at night after dinner. But then you may also want to market it to local businesses that hold regular meetings that provide snacks, such as attorneys’ offices or staffing agencies. Those two very different markets will require additional messaging, other platforms (maybe even traditional marketing versus digital marketing), different times of day, etc. In this example, you probably see the benefits of learning the ins and outs of your target audience.
Bringing Your Target Audience Closer to Personalization
When learning to market your business, you probably were told that personalization was vital. But how do you bring personalization into your marketing when you are unsure of your target audience? Now that you know your target audience, you can find them in their buyer’s journey.
Bringing back the example of the bakery from before, you could market sweet treats to women using targeted ads on TV during the hours of 5:00 P.M. - 11:00 P.M.
Or, if you’re keeping a more local approach and your budget low, you may want to post a Facebook or Instagram live between those hours on a weekday, allowing your target audience to see how and where those sweet treats are made—catching your target audience where they are spending their free time and at the precise moment when they would want to have a sweet treat is how to bring some elements of personalization into your marketing.
Now that you see the benefits of understanding your target audience and how to reach them, how can you leverage that information to your advantage? Book a discovery call today!
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