Aim For The Bullseye And You Might Come Close

SYNOPSIS IN POINT FORM

• Find out your market audience before you embark on any business project
• Many crucial initial decisions depend on your market audience
• Main factors are : age, gender, location, marital status, income, social standing, profession, lifestyle, interests and pastimes
• Your audience could also be segmented into various subgroups
• Will your audience remain local, regional, national, or international
• You may conduct surveys, questionnaires, interviews & focus groups
• Inexpensive methods also include sourcing data online, online groups & platforms, informal chat and surveying competitors
• Also find out how these people communicate, chat and purchase similar products
• All your marketing spend should be focused on this audience and communicated through the same media and platforms
• If you are a B-to-B not a B-to-C business the same principles apply

FULL ARTICLE

Knowing your target audience is one of the very first steps any business needs to make, whatever its type. This crucial knowledge will help you to decide on virtually everything – name, slogan, style, location, products, services, specialisations, customer focus and above all – your marketing type and spend.

We all want as many people as possible to get to know of our business. But the trick is to ensure that these people are potential customers who might be inclined to buy from us. Furthermore, as getting others to know about our business always costs time, effort and money, you will get infinitely more Euro for Euro from directing your marketing spend strictly to your target audience. Any other approach would simply dilute your marketing effort considerably.

What are the key elements which identify your audience? The main ones are usually characteristics such as : age, gender, location, marital status, income, social standing, profession, lifestyle, interests and pastimes.

These factors will enable you to identify your typical customer profile which is synonymous with your target audience.

There are many ways of finding out who your audience is. The most obvious and effective are direct or primary methods such as surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups and other such technical methods. These are however the most costly and laborious to conduct and to analyse.

You might also consider secondary indirect measures, such as sourcing such details online, following related discussions and fora, creating dedicated chats on social media and very simply asking around.

One of the very simplest and often effective methods is simply to ask others already operating in the same markets. Call it mystery shopping or market intelligence, or any other fancy name, but all you have to do is ask a simple question to the right people who are already in the know. Often in business, as with the rest of life, the simplest things are the best. Depending on circumstances you can choose to go in person. to phone, to email or to enquire over social media. You can equally choose whether you want to pose simply as who you really are, or a surveyor, or a student on an assignment, or a reporter. Often positioning yourself as a surveyor works best.

These secondary methods are normally much less costly than the primary ones and in most cases they are completely free of any costs. Ideally you will assign some budget for the primary methods but will always also conduct some of the latter.

Once you have established fairly clearly your market audience you can always test your results through social media groups and other online platforms by gauging people’s interest within and outside of your target groups. If you are say encouraging any form of interest or sales enquiries, you can then compare the difference in interest registered between your target groups and others, thus confirming your audience.

Once you have closely honed in on your audience, you then need to find out how these people communicate, how they operate and how they purchase. Knowing these habits is paramount to choosing your own communication methods with them.

Do they email, do they Google, do they Facebook, do they Twitter? Are they obsessed with Smartphone apps, are they addicted to social media chats and groups? Which web sites do they use? Which social media? Do they still buy newspapers and magazines? And most important of all, where and how do they shop for these products.

The answers to these questions should be exactly the way you communicate, advertise and promote to them, simply because that is where they are.

If on the other hand your clients are other businesses rather than end consumers (B to B not B to C), then similar exercises should be engaged to identify which profiles of businesses make up your target audience.

There are often cases where your audience is not so straightforward, but is made up of various subgroups, normally known as market segments. In this case the same rules apply, however you should first prioritise between each segment and allocate your marketing budget accordingly.

One factor to keep firmly in mind, is to define whether your audience will remain local, regional, national, or international. You could very easily start off by focusing on say local and regional only and then gradually target further afield.

Unless you truly have an infinite marketing budget and endless overall resources, it makes absolutely no sense to promote your business haphazardly with anyone. Know exactly who your typical clients are and find the best ways to focus all your spend and time on them.

In today’s endlessly intricate marketing world there are boundless targeting possibilities which will hit the nail right on the head and not hit your business down to the ground.