Identification of the target audience, customers who are interested in your product and services is the most important and first step in all kind of marketing and advertising process. Target audience means a particular group of people who want specific solutions in limited time online and offline. Before becoming the customer, they are your audience who read your blogs, watch your YouTube videos, comments, likes, shares and aware about your online marketing.
The problems of your target audience can be slow internet, less time for travel, stress, laziness, weight problem, a marketing problem, software problem, bad water supply, financial problem, bad environment, low traffic to the website, etc. in which people are willing to pay for you.
Some of the example to determine target audience:
- Online Education App/Website/Blog: Your target audience is students doing MBA but want to learn technical skills online. Now they can learn from a blog, YouTube and or by doing an online course.
- Entertainment App/Website/YouTube Channel: Your target audience is those people want to live tension free, looking for fun and entertainment on their mobile phone.
- Ayurveda Health Care E-Commerce Website: The target customer are those people have a weight problem and want to reduce the weight in min. cost and efforts.
Now to go deep, you have to identify the age so that you can create a better heading, product page description, social media pages and brand your products as per the age.
You also have to consider the educational qualification of your target customer or audience so that you can use appropriate language and easy words in advertising and marketing activities.
You also have to consider the locations, occupations of your target customer so that you can create a really engaging ad campaign to grow your sells online.
For example:
- Sports shoes for sports player.
- Formal dress for CEO/Managers.
- Jeans for college students.
- Insurance policy for drivers, civil engineers.
- Hatchback cars for small business owners.
- Website designing services for tour and travel companies,
- Online live TV for professionals and busy people to watch specific programs with family in the spare time that they got from a busy schedule.
- Cloud storage for graphics designing agencies and web services.
- Content writing services for digital marketing companies in Chicago.
- Remote staff services for home-based business owners.
- Online IT courses for computer science students.
- A blog for IT companies’ managers and owners.
- Cloud computing IaaS for data centers,
- A cloud computing platform/infra as a service for developers
- And digital marketing services for online stores etc. are the examples of services/products targeted for specific customers/businesses.
There are various ways to determine the target market. Even you can target the market directly or indirectly in the ad campaign. For example, the consumer of the product is 5-10 years child. But the actual purchaser is parents and grandparents who bring that product for the baby.
Then in the ad campaign, the target audience is the parents or grandparents.
Similarly, A local shop owner of sanitary items for the home will work on to build the network of painters, plumbers, and technicians instead of the direct purchaser (homeowners).
So that there are various creative ways that you can use for your product and services.
One company/product can have many types of audience.
It can be kids/teenagers/adults.
It can be housewives running a home-based business and freelancer providing business services and small business owners.
If you have a larger audience, then you will get larger sells for any kind of products, services, books, apps, technologies, devices.
For example, a movie target larger audience such as kids, teenagers, adults, working, non-working, females, males and almost everyone. Even the production cost and profit planning are based on the size of the audience and subject. And when the movie gets hit then it brings more than $100 billion dollars gross profit. It’s because the target audience is big, and the movie satisfied the expectation of the audience.
There are many things to share about it, but I think you got my point.
Following are some of the effective methods to determine your target customers and audience.
Identify the problems and opportunities in the local, national and international market:
It means first you need to identify the problem in the market that is happening with people. For example, companies integrated and used information technology in their business but after a certain period, they were unable to scale up their infrastructure, data storage and computing powers and unable to reduce the cost of doing business.
But today the solution for that problem is called cloud computing and it is created and marketed by cloud computing service providers or well-known companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft.
Why? It’s because they are continuously looking for problems and business opportunities related to the industries or in the world and then they created the product and services to solve that problems and they convince people through their market and advertisement that this is the best solutions for the business.
That’s why you should look for the problems and opportunities in your industry, your souring and in the local area, and bring something innovative and creative in the market and if it’s effective and valuable, people will buy it.
Related: Ways you can follow to grow your small business faster
Related: Business growth opportunities examples
Research on customers/people comments on other brands, product, and services:
Under this, you can research on 3 things:
- Who is the person commenting on other websites or on your own and what’s its profession and problems? It will help you to identify your target and ideal customers.
- What exactly people unable to get in the product and service from your competitors. From that, you can learn to improve the quality of your product.
- Research on your marketing content, what is the response of headlines on search engines.
Learn more: How to be innovative in business: Business and Innovation
You can use Artificial Intelligence chat plugins and code on your website. There is a high possibility that people can ask the question to you and they can share their problems and solutions.
It will help you connect with them and you will be able to understand their problems. And this is the fastest and most effective way to find and determine your target audience on the internet.
Use social media and analyze the data
Distribute content in a variety of formats related to your business on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp, etc. Do it for a few days. Collect the data and filter it in the spreadsheet.
Find the pattern, see what’s working including likes, shares, comments and website visits. If you track the behaviors of people on your business content, it’s a fastest and effective method to determine which one is group is your potential customers.
Learn more: How to perform market research online
Change the heading of product/articles/social media posts and even a tag line to determine your target audience:
You can make certain changes in your product such as instead of launching and making headline “personal development course for students”, make it “Personal development online course for IT professionals” or “Powerful personal development course for professional’s, personal development course for digital marketers”. And make certain changes in the syllabus and topics of the online course. And you will be able to get more students for your course.
So, I hope the above target market example will help you to identify and determine your target audience.
You can also take the target audience quiz. You can also understand the google analytics demographics and test the product or market through social media ad campaigns.
If you want to learn everything from the details then here the best online business courses that you can do to learn more.
And if you have any questions regarding your business growth, innovation, creativity, and idea, you can contact me and I will try to do my best to solve your confusions.