Target Audiences, also known as Buyer Personas, are a set of parameters that distinguish an ideal customer from others. It's tempting to accept any work that comes through the door, especially during tough times, but this can be detrimental in the long run.
Formalising your ideal customer will significantly benefit your brand or message promotion. Knowing your target audience will also ensure that marketing spending is not wasted on promoting your brand to people unlikely to buy your product.
Why do you need to know your Target Audience?
Knowing your target audience can significantly impact the goals you have set for your business. For example, do you want to increase sales? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Promoting high-end real estate to students probably isn’t the most effective use of your marketing budget; likewise, advertising high-quantity, low-profit consumer goods on a community noticeboard probably won't have the desired reach.
So, how do you find your target audience? It requires a deep dive into what you are doing and, more importantly, doing well.
We generally look to identify 3 key areas of a customer:
Demographics: What physically defines this person?
Psychographics: What motivates this person?
Insights: What is their known history to you?
Reviewing your recent sales and defining the characteristics of each sale is crucial.
Some of the Demographics to look for are:
What is the customer’s age?
Where does the customer live? Work?
What is the customer’s sex?
What is their financial status?
What is their relationship status?
Does the customer have a family?
Demographics answer the “who” question. Depending on the scale of your business or customer base, separating out the geographical segment from the demographics can further provide a better understanding of who this customer is physically.
Psychographics: This segment goes beyond demographics to consider lifestyle, attitudes, interests, and values.
What are the customer’s hobbies?
How do they access and interact with media?
How is your product solving their problem?
What is their experience with your product?
Insights clarify some of these customers' purchasing behaviours.
Does this customer shop online, or does this customer only buy locally?
Does the customer prefer a hard touch or soft touch experience? Do they need to see and feel a product before committing? (Would you buy a new car online, or would you like to take it for a test drive)
Do they need permission from their significant other or perhaps their manager?
What are the steps they take in making a decision?
To build the best profile of your ideal customer, document as many data points as you can on these buyers. By analysing the results, you should start to see similarities, such as the age of your clients, location, or whether they prefer to interact with your business face-to-face or over the phone. The averages become the foundation for our target audience.
Once the foundation persona is identified, you must start asking how your product solves this person’s problem. This is one of my favourite parts of defining a target audience; this will provide the topics for multiple campaigns or promotions. Better yet, define it as a question. For example, at Short Story Long, we aim to help businesses understand and take control of their marketing. One of the problems we identified within our target audience is that many businesses understand they need to market, but the results lack consistency. An example of how we have formed this problem as a question is:
“Are you struggling to define and understand your target audience?”
If you are reading this blog, then it just might have worked.
What if your product is new to the market? Or new to your Company?
Introducing a new product to the market always presents challenges. Are you introducing a new product to your existing customers? Is this product a whole new offering to a completely new set of customers? Again, it comes down to defining that target audience. Start with what you know. Who is this product intended for? Are there any logistics that make the product unattractive in certain areas, like shipping costs?
To get the best results, you will likely need to conduct some market research to confirm your target audience. Visit a competitor who is providing a similar product. Who is visiting? What location is the product being distributed to/from? Are they having to travel far? How can you do it better?
Summarise the data you have collected and write a sentence or two clearly demonstrating who your Target Audience is. One thing I liked to do when I collected all these data points was to create a story about this person. I find this a very helpful way of communicating this person to my staff and colleagues. You can always use ChatGPT or other AI-assisted tools to summarise your persona into a narrative. For example, a fitness brand's target audience may be local women between the ages of 19 and 25 who are interested in health and wellness.
Be Specific and purposeful. The more information you add to this description, the more clearly you can articulate this persona to your staff and colleagues. Give this person a name.
A revised example for the above target audience:
Meet Anne, a 42-year-old woman living in Ngunguru, Whangarei. Anne is married and has two children. Anne works full-time in an office and enjoys spending weekends with her family. She finds it challenging to stay active, especially during the winter months when shorter days limit her opportunities to exercise outdoors.
Testing, Testing, Testing…
Test your persona. Run split test ads on the platform your persona interacts with best. Look into the results. What stands out to you? Is there anything that needs to change?
This might seem like a lot of work, but having a clear target audience is critical to running a successful marketing campaign and will save you time and money in the long run. It ensures your efforts and spending are directed at the most likely conversion source, not just waving your flag down a dead-end street.
About Us:
Short Story Long empowers businesses to take control of their marketing, get actual results, and crush their goals. We’re here to help, So if you want to know more about targeting the right people or have any other marketing-related questions, reach out!
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