Defining Target Audience
by Mat GreenfieldWhy consider target audience?
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons for taking the time to understand your target audience.
‘Target audience’ is a way of defining the group of people that buy your products and services. It’s an artificial segmentation of consumers at large - grouping them by characteristics that identify them as being potential customers. The more specific you can be about your target audience, the more effective your marketing will be.
Assessing your target audience is critical for a number of reasons. Once you understand who will be visiting your site, you can determine what information to include, whether to be formal or friendly, how much technical jargon is appropriate and so on.
In understanding your target audience, you can also begin to determine what they are looking for, and so create your messaging and calls to action to be most compelling to that target.
It’s also likely that you have more than one target audience even for the same product/service, and doing an assessment of them will enable you to understand to what extent your different audiences should be handled differently.
Building a profile
The key to understanding your target audiences is identifying what elements bind them together into a cohesive group. It’s the similarity between people that holds the key to communicating with them effectively. For example, if I decide that I’m targeting hotel managers, then that helps me communicate with them because I can make some valid generalizations about the types of problems they face, what they’re interested in, perhaps even their approximate age.
Understanding this, it should be apparent that a very general target audience definition isn’t terribly helpful. For example, a dry-cleaner that defines their target as “people who want things dry-cleaned” isn’t defining their audience closely enough, because the definition doesn’t tell you anything about who these people are, or how to communicate with them.
A few elements to consider are sex, age, economic status, geographic area, or other lifestyle factors such as job title, hobbies and interests, family status, etc. You are looking for the elements that bind them together as some sort of group.
In some cases this will be easy. If you target doctors or cycling enthusiasts for example, your profile may not go any further than that – although ideally it would include specifics to further narrow the group such as pediatricians, or mountain bikers. It’s also possible to segment further by geography, age, etc, so doctors in the tri-county area, or 40+ cycling enthusiasts would work well too.
It’s likely though, that defining your target audience is a little more problematic. It may seem that the only thing linking your customers is that they use your services! If it seems that way at first, don’t sweat. It may be that you’re trying to group your audience all together, when in reality you services smaller pockets of sub-groups, so try to identify a series of mini-audiences within your overall customer base.
If you’re still stuck, here are a few questions that should get you going in the right direction:
When we launched the product/service, what types of people did we have in mind?
Since the launch, what new groups have also expressed interest in the product?
If an existing customer tells a friend about one of my products/services, what characteristics are the two people likely to have in common?
Selecting the right target audiences
Once you have a list of possible targets, you’ll probably find that you have too many to reasonably target, or that your list contains some groups that aren’t terribly profitable for one reason or another.
Identifying how many targets you can focus on is a tough question. Unfortunately the answer is “not too many, and not too few” which isn’t incredibly helpful. Consider the two factors on either side of the scale. On one side is the need to reach as many people as possible in order to grow your business; on the other side is the issue of focus. Most people probably err on the side of growing their business when they should err on the side of focus, if anything. In marketing, being the big fish in a small pond is often a better growth strategy than being a minnow in an ocean.
You’ll have to ponder these two factors and make a determination about how many audiences you can target overall. In many businesses, it will make sense to focus most of your efforts on just one (or perhaps two) audiences at a time. We have found that effectively communicating to more than three target audiences is difficult to achieve on a single website. You might want to consider a series of smaller target-specific websites, or perhaps target your main three and then expand your reach as you grow revenues.
In order to organize and prioritize your list into a short-list of ‘finalists’, here are a few questions to consider for each one individually:
How much success have I already had with this group?
How well do I know and understand this group?
Do I know where these people visit regularly (real world and on-line)?
Would this group potentially spend a lot or a little on my products/services?
What size is this group?
If I attracted 10% of this group in the next 12 months, could I realistically expand to handle the demand?
Am I personally interested in, and excited by this group?
Now answer the following questions:
How many target audience(s) do you want to focus on? What are they?
Please list a percentage showing the importance that you place on these target audiences: (total 100%)
What is each of these audiences looking for when they visit your site?
Do you have different products/services that directly target these different groups?
Do you want these target audiences to take different actions upon visiting your site? If so, what?
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