Understand your target audience…

It is important to be able to establish and understand your businesses target audience.  Businesses will be tripping over each other trying to push their advertising onto the unwitting public, but if you take the necessary time to perform good market research then you should be a couple of steps ahead of the competition.

If you are aiming your advertising and marketing campaign to the wrong audience then you will obviously be wasting a lot of valuable time and money – so why not spend a little bit discovering who exactly your target audience is.

Obviously, your target audience will depend on the product or service you are providing – for example everyone needs their haircut.  However, there should be different marketing campaigns for each different section of the market – one for the elderly and one for teens for example.

There is the other side of the coin, where your business may have a small target audience in comparison and you will be looking to apply more focus to a specific section of the market.

Ask yourself a few simple questions…

When identifying your target audience, there are a few questions you should be asking yourself to narrow the field down;

•    Male or female? – Which gender is the business aimed at and which will it be better for?

•    How old? – Is your product or service suitable for 3 year olds or 30 year olds…or both?

•    How many GCSEs? – What level of education would your potential customer hold?

•    Single or married? – What is your potential customer’s marital status?

•    A need or a want? – Is your service or product a luxury or a necessity?

•    Income level – How much will your potential customer be earning?

•    Positioned by the cashier? – Is the product an impulse buy or will your potential customer be saving up over time?

•    Cash or card? – What is the most common method of payment for the product or service?

You should utilise surveys, questionnaires or secondary research to help you realise your target audience, and these questions should be in your mind when doing so – but what then?

Now apply your findings to your business plan!

After you have found your target audience you should implement your findings in your business plan…you have discovered who you should be attracting to your product or service and now you need to show how your business expects to go about attracting those customers.

You must show how your business plans to use the target audience’s purchase habits to its own benefits, so there must also be some investigation into the purchase habits of the target audience.

You then need to focus upon how you plan to meet the needs of your target audience and how their needs may change over the coming months or years.  By doing this you will be using what you discovered about your target audience and proving that you have a firm grasp of the direction in which they should be evolving.

What about you?

Do you have any advice or tips on the subject of target audiences?  Maybe you don’t believe that they are as important as we think?  Let us know…

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