Target Audience Definition:
The specified group that any piece of marketing or advertising is aimed towards. These will be your ideal buyers, or those that you believe will find your solution helpful. Your target audience might begin as a more vague image of the group you’re looking to target, but should be narrowed down into a buyer’s persona as you build your marketing.
Your target audience is one of the most important components of your marketing and growth strategy. Any business needs to know who their buyers are. Ultimately, if you don’t have a target audience, then you don’t have sales.
However, getting the target audience right is even more important. Your company, marketing, and solution all need to resonate with your target audience. They need to see the value in your product or service, and believe in its purpose enough to make a purchase.
Defining your target audience is the first step to generating a brand position, marketing message, and a marketing strategy. Your marketing needs to target your specific audience, and help them with their problem. This is why it’s important to go beyond the wider demographic, and build a target audience that is as niche as possible – otherwise known as a buyer’s persona.
Target Audience Vs The Buyers Persona
The buyers persona is almost synonymous with target audience. However, for marketers, identifying and building a buyers persona allows them to generate content and strategies that are much more targeted.
Marketers need to know who is on the receiving end of each piece of content, in order to tailor it to suit their specific concerns. That’s why the buyers persona goes beyond basic demographic information.
To begin building a buyers persona, conduct research into your current customers, your competitors customers, and your ideal customers. Do they all have things in common? It’s important to note that when we say customers, we mean specifically who that person is on the receiving end, rather than a vague identifier like “CEO”.
Start by identifying demographic trends, as these are still important. Are your buyers typically male or female? Do they live in similar areas? Are they working in similar roles? This is all valuable information.
Next, delve further into the psychographics. This is information pertaining to the individual like their desires, fears, and motivations. You need to understand what drives each buyer to a purchase decision, and what is most important to them.
You might identify a few different buyers personas, that require different targeting. This is fine, as that’s what the marketing message test and learn approach is for.
Target Audience Segmentation
As mentioned, during the process of identifying your buyers, you’re likely to find that you have more than one target buyer. If your solution remedies a variety of problems, this is perfectly normal. However, each of these personas will need different messaging, and different marketing approaches.
Marketing isn’t one size fits all. Audience segmentation is a great strategy to ensure that you reach the right buyers, at the right time, with the right piece of content. You cannot build meaningful relationships by sharing vague or indirect information with your leads. You need to show that you understand their individual needs and problems.
CRM systems allow you to create segments and lists for your audiences, where you can group contacts together according to a variety of criteria. You could group by demographics like age, or psychographics like specific problems they face or solutions they’re interested in. This is one of the best ways to make sure that your target audience works for you.
The Buyer’s Journey
Once you’ve identified your target audience, your target buyer’s personas, and any segments within those groups, you need to understand their relationships with your company. Each buyer will pass through a journey with your brand. It’s the role of marketing to ensure that journey ends with a purchase.
Generally speaking, the three stages of the buyer’s journey are Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Your marketing needs to reach each buyer at every stage of this journey, and help drive them through to the next stage. Take the time to consider what each member of your target audience needs, to motivate them through the buyer’s journey.
The combination of your target audience, your buyer’s personas, audience segmentation, and understanding of the buyer’s journey, ensures that your marketing and messaging have the best chance of securing a sale or conversion. At the beginning of this entire process is the target audience definition. Without a target audience, marketing cannot perform.
At Nituno, we work with B2B tech businesses to help them understand and identify their target audience, and their target market. Finding the person at the receiving end of each communication with your business is a critical first step to building a holistic marketing strategy. Get in touch with us for help researching your market, and building a marketing approach that works.
