What is a target audience? Definition and what it means for your business
When it comes to promoting your business, it’s very important that you know what your target audience is and how to reach them. However it may seem that you must reach broader audiences and that focusing on specific groups of people is limiting, you have to be direct. Reaching directly these who are interested in your product or service will only bring you more profit. So when you decide what your message is, you need to understand who it is meant for.
What is a target audience? A simple definition
Simply put your target audience is a group of people that are most likely to be interested in your product or service. For instance if you have a plumbing company, it’s highly possible that the major part of your costumers is property owners. If you sell toys, you are likely to have parents and other relatives as your clients. Other examples of target audiences: single women in their 20s, teens, working mothers, elderly people and cat owners. Sometimes your target audience is a very narrow group of people. Say, you sell elite suits for people in the top positions in their 20s or 30s, living in a specific city and having an average income of over than $100,000 per year.
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Why is it important?
If you want to convince people to purchase your product or service, you need to pay close attention to content and tone of your message. There must be a personal connection to establish a trustful relationship with your customer. Let’s say you want to sell a product for young people and teenagers. In this case you make the tone of your message energetic and use digital and social media. On the contrary if you want to reach the audience consisting mostly of elderly people, you prefer to use print production and a calmer tone of the message.
Finding your target audience
When it comes to finding your target audience, the definition of it may come in handy. First you must think what specific needs your product or service meets. Imagine you create websites. You will have retired people as your customers on very rare occasions. Other services and products have though broader audiences. For instance, a person of any gender, age group and income can buy tomato sauce and thus become a part of your target audience. In this case you can do less research. However there are cases when you need more data about your customers so that you can focus on this particular group of people. One of the ways to achieve your goal is to offer a special price for everyone who fills a questionnaire for you.
Evaluating your message
The most important part of reaching your target audience is checking if your promotion methods actually work. To assess the success of your campaign you can monitor sales, customer traffic, information enquiries and phone calls. There is a variety of tools that can help you do that. However you can choose to let a specialist work with your target audience while you do what you’re best at – your business.
