The first and one of the most necessary task for you as a marketer is to define your target market.
Defining your target market is essential for every other marketing strategies and effort you put in place.
For a successful marketing campaign, you need to identify who your customers are, where they need, their pain points and how to convince them to buy.
Download free buyers persona template to help define an accurate profile for your target audience
Meaning of Target audience?
Target audience is a well-defined set of people that you plan to sell your product or service.
They are qualified prospects that need your product or service they are willing to buy and have financial ability to buy.
Defining your target marketing requires segmenting your prospects based on a set of characteristics like demography and financial status.
The reason why this is important is that the success of all your marketing effort is principally dependent on defining the right target market.
How to Know your Target Audience?
The first step to knowing your target audience is to understand your existing customers.
It will give you a detailed understanding of who your ideal customers are, and you can extend these characteristics to your target market.
Related: 3 Types of Relationships Customers Expect
For a B2C company, the following data can be useful.
Age range: Find out your existing customers’ age range to understand how age affects their buying behaviour and the values they derive from using your product or service.
Gender ratio: The gender ratio will help you understand the composition of your customers on how to create effective segmentation for result-oriented marketing.
How informed your customers are: understanding your customers level of education will give you knowledge of how to reach them, help your communication channel selections, the tone of your marketing campaigns
Financial status: your customers’ income level, economic class and pattern of spending is necessary to measure the ability to pay and pricing.
Location: Where are your customers located where do they visit online, how can you segment and group them.
Their needs: Why do they buy from you, and what needs does your product or service meets?
Understanding your existing customers’ needs will help you create a perfect solution that meets their needs and also help you define your unique selling points.
Research Your Competitors
Know your competitors’ strength, strategies, how they serve their customers, their next move. Find out their weakness and see how you can take advantage of that to convert some of their displeased customers to your happy customers.
If you understand your competitors’ buyers persona, you will be able to target and prospect their customers and potential customers too.
Understand Your Unique Selling Point
A brand unique selling point is that factor that makes the brand stand out among others. A unique selling point can be fast delivery, product or service quality, brand identity or service.
So know your strength, brand uniqueness and capitalize on that to sell positive message and value.
Now Define Your Target Market.
Now that you know so much about your customers, competitors unique selling point (USP), its time to define your target market, which is the foundation of successful marketing effort.
You can download and use my free attached buyers’ personas template to define your target market.
Alternatively, set relevant questions similar to your existing customers defined characteristics, your competitors’ research report and your unique selling point to define your target market.
Test and Review Defined Target market.
The last step is to test and review the effectiveness of your defined target market to measure performance.
Create contents based on your defined buyer persona, distribute and promote these contents on social media to measure performance. If it attracts and engages expected potential customers, then you are on the right track.