Do You Know Who Your Target Audience Is?

One of the biggest mistakes I see small businesses make is not knowing their audience.

Why is it important for you to know your audience?

These are the people who are buying your service or product. Knowing who they are and what they need will help you go to the right places to market to them (are they on Facebook or Pinterest? Do they even use social media?), and help you understand why your business exists.

How can what you’re selling benefit the people you’re selling to?

Knowing your audience helps to turn the money and time you spend marketing to them into an investment rather than an expense. If you’re just blindly marketing to anyone and everyone, you’re likely wasting your precious time, energy and resources trying to get to someone, anyone, who will send money your way. This sounds absolutely exhausting!
Let’s walk through the steps to determine your target audience. To make this extra fun, let’s pretend you’re a baby clothing store (this might sound like a target market that’s predetermined, but there are many factors that you may not have even thought of):
Who’s Already Buying From You? Take a look at your current customer list. Who is bringing in the most business? What characteristics do they have in common? As a baby clothing store, you might realize that it’s not parents, but friends and family members of parents buying clothing to celebrate the baby. Many people might come into the store to buy gifts and so it would be guests of events like baby showers and birthday parties that you would want to reach out to!

Who is Your Competition? Take a look at who the competition is serving. Don’t go after their customers, but maybe who they’re targeting are people you never thought of. Maybe other baby stores are marketing to pregnant mothers, with a big emphasis on newborn wear or moms who are active outdoors and need active wear for their babies.
What Are Your Products’ Benefits? Take a look at your products and determine their benefits. If you’re a high-end clothing store, you might take a look at your jackets and determine that, while at a higher price point, the jackets you sell are classic and durable. The jackets you sell may be more expensive, but the parents who buy them value high quality design and will be keeping them for future children they add to the family.
What Characteristics Does Your Market Share? Create a story around your customer using specific criteria like age, gender, location, income, education, occupation, values and hobbies. Having an idea about this information will help you understand what features on your clothing will most appeal to them, what media they will most likely turn to to learn about you, and ultimately what drives them to make decisions.
Determining your target market will help save you a lot of time as you plan a marketing plan that resonates with the people who value and buy what you are selling.
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