Whether your business is brand new or 20+ years old, one of the most beneficial things you can do to guarantee successful sales is to define your target audience - AKA your ideal customers. Your target audience is made up of a specific demographic of people with shared characteristics who are most likely to be interested in your product or services. These characteristics can range from age, gender, geographic location, hobbies, occupation, and more. Identifying your ideal customers will help refine your audience to a smaller size and lead to more successful sales, instead of wasting time and/or money campaigning to a large audience without guaranteed results. As one says, work smarter not harder!
Why is A Target Audience Important
Defining your target audience will save you time and money, help build trust with your clientele, and lead to overall success for your business. If you know who is most likely to purchase your services or products, you can then create a successful and detailed marketing strategy to aim at this specific audience. This will help you choose what social media platforms to utilize and what tone of voice to write in. It will also allow you to keep up with current trends and create an appealing brand. Connecting with your target audience will help customers feel more secure and associated with your business, all while building trust. This ultimately results in a successful match!
Tips to Help Define Your Target Audience
When beginning to define your target audience, think about the needs your service or product fulfills. Keep the mindset that you have the solution to your customer’s problem. Don’t forget to think about your current customers and what characteristics they have in common! Your target audience might already be sitting right under your nose.
It is crucial to think about appealing to the decision-maker (or financial power) for the clientele you are targeting. For example, if you sell children’s toys, you need to think about if the children will want to play with your product. But you also don’t want to leave out the parents, who hold the final decision of whether they want to purchase your product.
Depending on your business, you may have multiple facets that demand multiple audiences. For example, a restaurant might target families for their catering services, but college students and young adults for their late-night bar hours. The same business can utilize different platforms and voices to reach these specific groups of people for their desired outcome!
There are many different channels to reach your audience such as emails, social media, SMS, and even printed flyers. It is beneficial to utilize analytics and data reports for each platform your business uses in order to know who is resonating with your marketing and where they find out about your services or products. This helps you narrow down WHERE to reach WHO.
While a younger demographic of individuals might be reachable on social media, maybe the older generation still prefers receiving email promotions. Once you know who responds to your campaigns, you can tailor your voice to draw more of the same audience.
Your “voice” in digital marketing is a combination of rhetoric and vocabulary to express your point of view and tone. For example, is it appropriate for your campaigns to use slang words, or is your vocabulary more sophisticated? Defining your target audience will help you create a voice that is appropriate, and effective in marketing your message.
If you need help defining your target audience, we can help! Reach out to kim@skigital.com for more details. For more tips and information on how to define your target audience, watch our short video here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRNWgTeF/?k=1