For a solid marketing plan, it is important to identify and define your target audience. This will be a specific group of people or businesses that you want to reach with your marketing messages. They will be most likely to buy your products and services, intrinsically linked by certain characteristics. For example, their buying behaviours or demographics.

Many businesses will plan to target anyone who is interested in their products or services. However, by targeting a specific audience you will gain a more focused approach. This will help to generate business, whilst not excluding other audiences. By clearly defining a target audience, it’s much easier to understand how, where and who to market your brand to.

Here we break down how to identify your target audience in simple steps.

Step One: Determining Who Would Benefit from Your Product/Service

A sensible place to start in determining your target audience is to understand what you can do to help. What does your product or service provide to customers? What needs are you satisfying or which problems can you solve? Once you know what it is you have to offer, you can begin to determine who your target customer is.

Step Two: Identifying Your Target Audience

For B2C marketing, there are many different factors to contemplate, including age, sex, location, marital status and spending power. Who is your target and what are they looking to spend? It can be useful to think about selecting your target market as a multi-stage funnel. For example, if your product or service targets a certain gender, you may want to immediately narrow your audience.

You might then consider age, following a number of steps before you arrive at the final stage of spending power. You should then be able to find an audience that is both interested in what you have to offer and are able to afford it.

For B2B marketing, a multi-stage funnel approach can also be helpful. However, rather than focusing on individuals, you will instead narrow your audience in terms of business sector, size of business and buying power.

Step Three: Collecting Data

Although a funnel approach can help to draw conclusions, it is vital to pair this with data from a range of sources. For example:

• Surveys: You can gather metrics by conducting surveys online or by emails. Consider what responses you receive from certain demographic groups.
• Online: Look into your website and social media analytics to find out more about your customers. It may also be helpful to investigate who is engaging with you on social media.
• Competition: Analyse your competitor’s activity, who they are targeting and who is engaging with them on social media. This will help your marketing team to identify potential threats and opportunities to plan for, including gaps in the market.

Step Four: Evaluate

Once you have analysed all of your data and have began to decide on your target audience, consider the following:

• Does this audience have a need for your product/service?
• What drives this audience to make purchasing decisions?
• Does this audience have sufficient income to purchase your product/service?
• Which channels would be most effective at delivering marketing messages to this audience?
• What threats and opportunities come with the audience?

Once you have finalised your desired target audience, you can begin trial and error with different marketing campaigns. With each campaign you will develop a clearer understanding of your desired audience. It can also help you to determine if you should be targeting a broader or more niche audience.

For help on delivering your digital marketing campaigns to your target audience, contact our team about our services on 0121 308 0219.