4 Ideas To Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying who you are selling to can be as important as what you are selling, sometimes even more.

Identifying target audiences is one of the key factors which drives business success.

While we are in an age where businesses have the world as their canvas, it is important to understand that one can’t get caught up in the quagmire of targeting the world.

This is important more so to small businesses and entrepreneurs who are trying to grow and misconstrue that when you are growing, any and everyone out there is a potential buyer.

Here is the problem with that.

There are currently billions of users who use the internet to make their purchase decisions. And to cater to the needs and wants of those billions of users, there are billions of products and services out there.

Each of these billions of products and services is pushed by companies who are doing the same thing as you are.

Now if you were to just imagine the amount of content being created by companies, both big and small, what chance would your content have if it was not targeted to a more specific audience.

The idea of building a successful business with inbound leads is to be as specific as possible about the people you are targetting. You need to find a group of people from the overall demographic who are more likely to buy your product and create content that is more in line with their expectations.

It is a simple equation, your target audience engages with stuff that they like to engage with, and your content needs to be in line with that.

The mistake that 99% of businesses are making is they are comparing their chapter 1 to someone else’s chapter 20.

The large businesses that you see driving engagement with thousands of people do not only create a post and put it up there. There are millions in investments that go into getting that post to reach the people that it is supposed to reach. Creating the content is one part of it, probably 1/5th of the overall strategy. For small businesses and an entrepreneur who is starting, unfortunately, at the beginning that 1/5th is all that is possible.

Now imagine this.

You do not get a million likes and 1000 comments on your post. Imagine that you are getting 100 likes and 10 comments on your post, but these 100 likes and 10 comments are consistent with every post you put out and are steadily increasing in small digits, say it goes from a 100 to 105, and so on.

There is a better chance of driving conversions upward of 30% with these genuine likes and 10 comments rather than chasing after those million views and thousands of comments which you can acquire through boosting posts.

This steady stream of 100 potential customers can do you way more good than getting thousands of customers who are window shopping, they are your tribe and they feel appreciated when you create content that they like and are likely to buy from you.

Here is how you can do it.

You need to localize your effort and strike a balance between what you create and who you are targeting.

It is like using long-tailed keywords, long-tailed keywords in SEO are those which do not have a high search volume, but they do not have high competition when it comes to ranking either. You get a consistent audience of people who are looking for exactly what you have put out there as visitors to your site. Again, compounding gains.

In order to localize your effort and get as specific as possible, you need to identify your target audience.

Now you might think that is easy, people my age are my target audience, but there are certain organized steps which help you create a better profile and have fun while doing it.

Those Steps Are to Identify:

Audience Age Group and Demographic

Think about what your brand represents. It’s ethos, pathos, logos, and research as to who that would resonate with.

The general rule of thumb is to create a range, between 5–10 years.

The parameters you can use to identify the target age group again come with your brand ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

For example, if you are selling shirts that have a low price point but are smart and bear a youthful look and you target 40 years old’s you are not really going to close much business. You would do much better-creating content which is in line with those people who are yet just beginning their careers or are still exploring. Hence your target age group would say be 22–30 years when people just get out of college and are going to interviews etc.

Life Stages

When you break it down, there are 4 stages that a person goes through in life, these are

Learning

Exploration

Establishment

Decline

Each of the above-mentioned stages has points at which a person’s likes, dislikes, interests, opinions exhibit some very common personality traits. When you identify the personality traits which your brand will most likely resonate with, you will get a great understanding of how your target audience thinks and how you can align with that thought process.

Psychology

Purchase decisions, believe it or not, are driven by a certain psyche that varies with each target group.

While value is the one thing that can be considered common with all audiences, how they perceive value is where the difference lies.

When you are able to understand how the value you are offering will be perceived by audiences, you can identify who you need to sell to.

Product Type

When it comes to buying behaviour, Philip Kotler the guru of modern day marketing makes it easy for us.

Based on the combinations of diff between brands and involvement in the purchase decision of your consumer, you can understand who your consumers are and which part your product is in.

These are just a few, there are many permutations and combinations you can try and figure who you should be selling to.

Making your efforts as specific as possible can be a game-changer for you and it begins with identifying who you should be marketing to and how you need to be marketing to them.

Get an understanding of your brand, who your competitors are, what kind of interactions are brands that are similar to yours driving with audiences.

You might want to check complimenting brands as well, ones which are not your direct competition, but who cater to the same or similar target audiences.

The point is, focussing on building an inside out eco system with a strong product, good customer retention and a steady stream of targeted customers leads to an effective marketing strategy and success.

What do you think of these? Let us know in the comments.