How to define your target audience

When thinking about target audience, the big question is “Who is my target audience?” sometimes a harder question to answer than anticipated. It’s very important to know who your audience is, if you don’t then you may be marketing your products or services to the wrong category of people. Sometimes it’s quite self-explanatory who they are, for instance we are a web development company so we primarily focus on selling ourselves and our services to business owners, CEO’S, managing directors… you get the idea! Here are some pointers on how to define your target audience.

Current customer base

To get some idea about who you should be marketing to, it’s easy to go back and have a look at your current customer base, see what the profiles of the people who have already bought your products or services are. Look for common characteristics or interests, because more than likely other people with similarities as your customers could benefit from your product/service.

Competition

You need to look at competitive companies who offer the same to customers as you do, look for the sort of people that they target. One way you can do this is on social media, especially Twitter and Instagram, you can look at who follows them as this means they're showing an interest in that company. It costs nothing every now and again to keep researching your competition’s customer base and target audience.

Product/service

When it comes to your product/services, it’s best to think of the features along with benefits and possibly WHO will benefit from it. For example, a web designer provides high quality and responsive websites. The benefit of this is a professional website which can attract more people and gradually help to increase conversion rates. Who would benefit from a professional and responsive website? Primarily it would be another business but can be narrowed down to a particular industry e.g. accounting, real estate, fashion etc.

Demographics

Demographics are an important part of marketing used to identify specific characteristics. When it comes to who would benefit from your company, you need to choose specific demographics to target. You need to consider:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Income
• Marital status
• Occupation
• Ethnic background

Delving a bit deeper, you can also consider more personal characteristics of your ideal target audience including:

• Personality
• Attitudes
• Hobbies/interests
• Lifestyles
• Behaviours

It’s important to have a target audience profile because like stated before, you don’t want to be marketing to the wrong people. By having a target audience profile, you can conduct much better in-depth research to understand as much as possible about that profile, giving you a competitive advantage over your competitors.

This means you’ll be able to meet their needs better than the competitors. Also, as your company and team grow, you’re able to get new team members up to speed.