A short question for you – why is it important to understand your target market? Not 100% sure? Read this article to find the answer.
Have you launched your new product blindly without knowing about your target audience? Do you understand the importance of identifying your target market? Your product/service should be helpful for a specific audience type, or your target market.
What Is The Target Market?
The target market is the market that a business focuses on when launching a new product/service. This market comprises an audience or people who would likely use your product/service. These are the end-users who will end up using your product/service.
For instance, a business that manufacturers walking sticks will treat elderlies as their target market. Similarly, a company that makes microwaves will treat bakers, chefs, and people interested in cooking as their target audience.
What Is A Good Target Market?
How do you separate a good audience from a wrong audience? Should you focus more on the bad audience, or should you let them go? This is when knowing a good target market is essential.
An ideal or good target market should be:
A Good Target Market Is Specific
Amongst your target market, there would be audiences that aren’t interested in your product, no matter what. They would never make a purchase, will never engage, and stay disinterested. Letting go of such an audience is beneficial. Spending your time on such an audience would reap no benefits. Therefore, such an audience is general and should not be your prime focus.
Only ‘specific audience’ out of your target market should be focused on.
A Good Target Market Is Backed By Data
Defining your target audience on gut feelings and assumptions will lead you nowhere. At the time, you will have a list of the hypothetical target market of no use. Data should reflect all the inclusions and exclusions on the target market list. Such data should be collected from a reliable source that provides accurate data of the audience. Email IDs and social media profiles can help you rectify and double-check the collected data.
A Good Target Market Is Consumer-Centric
The people that are more likely to contribute to your conversion rate/sales should be skimmed. You will know after a while which customers are genuine and show interest in your brand/product. Keep engaging with such customers and not those who do not want to engage with your brand.
Email sequence marketing helps a lot in identifying interested customers from non-interested customers. Also, the cart abandonment rate and other similar metrics help a lot.
Why Is It Important To Identify The Target Market?
Helps In Defining Product Description
Product description helps your target audience learn more about the product. Both product descriptions and target audiences are interrelated. You need to know your target audience better to provide a better and concrete description. You can tailor the product description accordingly if you know your target market’s likes and dislikes. For instance, for a product description of a fabric, mentioning the type of fabric is essential, along with its cleaning instructions. The product description would also include how to style it (if on an eCommerce website).
Therefore, identifying the target market helps know the audience’s problems regarding your product and eliminate them by providing solutions to them in your product description. For instance, when buying any fabric, the first thought is to know about its maintenance and care (like needing a dry clean, no tumble dry, etc.). Thus, product descriptions define the same with the help of identifying its target market first.
Easy To Manage User’s Expectations
Identifying the target market is also closely related to managing users’ expectations. For instance, if your product is a wheelchair, knowing the design of the wheelchair will help you target your audience better.
Defining your target market, in this case, is of utmost importance. Would your product cater to the needs of only elderlies suffering from stroke, dementia, disability, or to people of younger age with special needs as well? If you know your user’s expectations better, you will fulfill them better with your product/service.
Doing so will most likely add to the number of satisfied customers that would further suggest to other people about your product. Therefore, identifying the target market, their expectations are essential.
Allows Identification Of The Marketing Tools To Use
Identifying and understanding your target market helps you put the right marketing tools in place. Focusing not just on the online marketing tools, you can use the traditional means of marketing as well, depending on the habits and preferences of your target audience.
If your target audience is the young generation/students, you can use social media, websites, and apps, i.e., digital marketing tools, to garner their attention. At the same time, print media like newspapers, flyers, and signages work well.
In other cases, if you are targeting elderlies, you need to prefer television, radio, print media more as your marketing tools.
Helps In Framing Business Strategies
Identifying your target market makes it easy to frame business strategies as well. You can adapt your business strategies to match the needs and wants of your audience. Instead of working on providing everything to everyone, catering to a particular segment of the audience helps businesses provide better customer satisfaction, build brand loyalty and result in consumer retention. In short, this will enhance the number of repeat purchases.
Helps In Product Development
Identifying the target market helps you create more innovative products different from existing products. This provides a competitive edge. Studying your target market will offer you insights into needs that are not met yet. It also helps to identify the environment in which the product is sold. For instance, selling short dresses in countries that follow restraints on such dressing would be a total disaster.
This allows business to develop their product accordingly such that it meets the demand of the audience rightly.
For this, you can study the market demand, gap analysis, customer purchase journey, buying behavior, pricing policies etc.
Helps In Studying Competitors
Well, make sure you can have the same target audience as your competitor. Plus, if you have just entered the market, it would be challenging to penetrate deeper into it if you follow the same basic strategies as your competitor.
What should you do to set your business apart? You need to think out of the box. This could be in terms of product development and marketing strategies as well. Adding quick new features to your product can help it gain more attention. Similarly, providing freebies along with your product, special discounts, and offers are some of the market strategies that will allow you to divert your target market focus towards your product/service.
You need to think differently from your competitors to establish that competitive edge.
How To Identify/Determine The Target Market?
Identifying or determining your target market is crucial as well as time-consuming. Marketing practices form a great part of identifying the target market.
To determine a target market, it is essential to understand and define your product/service fully. Next, it is essential to define the person/business likely to use your product. They could be defined upon various demographic factors like gender, age, preferences, geographical area, and much more.
This process will allow you to understand the needs and preferences of the audience better. Apart from these, consumer data is a key in the world of the digital era. People benefit a lot from users’ private data that allows businesses to identify and know their target audience to the next level.
What Information To Gather About The Target Market?
If it’s becoming a bit too overwhelming to know where to start from when collecting data about your target market, break down the data into small steps. To help you identify your target market better, here is some of the information to gather to start from.
The Categories They Fall Into
The basic criterion to identify the target market is demographic information (also mentioned above). A product/service may not only cater to a specific target market, especially if it is a household product like toothpaste, your target market will be too wide.
What to do in such a case? No worries, start with gathering basic information like marital status, age, gender, occupation, income level, geographical area, and socioeconomic status (this will help you decide the product’s price). Consolidate the data gathered from such categories and find the common points. This will help you frame a common marketing strategy that will fit all. This process is also known as segmentation.
Under segmentation, the target market can be further identified based on psychographic factors, behavioral factors, distribution channels etc.
When Are They Free?
After identifying your target market, delving deep into their hobbies and their free time will help businesses advertise and market their product accordingly. In the age of social media, identifying your target market’s free time is thoroughly useful. If you know when your audience is available on social media sites, it will help you schedule your posts accordingly.
Knowing about their daily activities and interests will help you create your social media posts accordingly. The same goes for email marketing. If you are aware of when your audience signs in, it increases the chances of your email being viewed. This will help you engage with your audience better and increase your brand’s visibility as well.
Where Do They Reside?
The geographical area of your target market is another important piece of data to gather. Each country, state, and region follow its own culture, religion, tastes, and preferences. Do they follow the westernized culture or the traditional culture? Do they have access to mobile phones, internet, or are they still dependent on radios, pamphlets, and television for their first-hand information?
Depending on this information, businesses can connect to their audience accordingly. You can market your product/service accordingly. Will you be able to target your audience through digital marketing or traditional marketing? You will get clear answers to such questions.
Why Should They Purchase From Your Business?
When identifying your target market, it is essential to ask this question.
- Why should your target market buy your product/service?
- What benefits does the product or service provide?
- Why should they choose your product/service over others?
- What additional value does your product provide?
Knowing the answers to these questions is crucial. Once you know them, it is also essential to let your audience know the answers to such questions in their native language. You can make your blog posts, advertisements clear enough that make it easy for the target audience to know these answers.
When Do They Make A Purchase?
This question is a bit linked to the target audience’s free time, depending on the sort of business you have. This is because your audience is likely to purchase in their free time or otherwise when they require a product urgently. For instance, businesses like wedding photographers and event management know how it gets more clients during a particular season.
Therefore depending on your business, you can alleviate your marketing strategies during such a period. For instance, the demand for umbrellas increases during the rainy season. As a business, you can come up with innovative designs and concepts to make your product more viable than others.
For this reason, collecting the target market data is important so you can serve them the best hospitability and experience.
Their Channel Of Communication
Another important piece of information to gather about the target market is their means of communication with your business. You often find these questions in surveys that say, “how did you come across our product/service?” This question is usually followed by a few options like social media posts, website, marketing campaigns, paid search advertising, etc.
Why do businesses ask such a question? Knowing the channel of communication of your target market helps you divert your marketing efforts in the same route. If your target market mostly prefers using social media and marketing through other means like print media, it will make no sense.
Currently, social media, emails, and websites are the best free services to communicate with your target market. It lets you engage with them appropriately by following various social media and digital marketing strategies. For instance, giveaways, referrals, and paid promotions work well for social media. Similarly, for increasing traffic on your business website, taking the help of an SEO strategist, content marketing, paid advertising works wonders.
How Your Target Audience Is Likely To Visit You?
Are you a local store or an eCommerce store? Do you provide drive-in services or mainly attract walk-in customers? These are some important questions to figure out. This will help the business know where to invest the right money. If your business is land-based, you need to invest in making your storefront attractive and welcoming, place direction signs at the right places etc.
On the contrary, for an eCommerce store or an online business, the focus would be on improving your website’s performance and Google search rankings. If it’s a drive-in, the focus would be to maintain a proper parking area with maintained pavements.
Thus, businesses should not overlook how their target market is visiting them.
When Are Buyer Personas Important?
At this point, you have clearly identified your target market. You can place your product before your target market. But do you still feel disconnected from your audience? This is where buyer personas come into action. They help you to understand your target market even better.
Buyer personas are data representing the ideal customer you want to serve and attract. These personas are made from data collected for market research. Buyer personas are part of the target market found from within it.
Some of the target market audience turns into buyer personas. Buyer personas are much more specific and let you know the buying behavior of your buyers. Buyer personas deal with every buyer individually. It carefully analyses and attracts buyers according to their mindset. Thereby, it helps to further help in identifying how you should approach them and understand their challenges to let them covert.
It treats every customer as unique and approaches their needs accordingly. Here is an example that will help you differentiate between a target audience and a buyer persona.
For instance, a target audience for an EdTech business would be students between the age of 12 to 25 who lives in Adelaide and are preparing for either their school, college, or competitive exams.
Amongst these, a buyer persona would be a particular student, let’s say named Valentina, a student of class IX who takes the help of English lessons on the app and would likely be taking math courses as well.
Targeting a buyer persona helps businesses retain their customers as you will provide customized and exceptional attention to them. As in this case, you may personally call them to know if they are having any trouble following the courses and how you can help the student further.
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