One of the first things a marketer needs to figure out is who in the world they are marketing to. And as much as you’d like to believe it, “everyone” is not a target audience — not to mention, no company can afford to market to everyone. Not even Apple, despite having more than 1.8 billion active Apple devices worldwide.

In many cases, marketers are overshooting their reach to a much broader target market than need be. If there’s one golden rule that comes with discovering your audience, it’s this: the more specific your target market, the more intentional your marketing tactics can be.

Think about it: clearly defining a target audience is the reason Ford markets pick-up trucks to drivers in North Dakota and Texas rather than those in California and New York. Besides geography, knowing other demographic and psychographic information about your audience is crucial for developing an effective marketing plan.

In this article, we’ll discuss the key components of a target market and how you can define yours.

What is a target market?

There are two specific groups that generally comprise your target market:

People or businesses that need your product
Those who influence the people or businesses that need your product

Many people assume that your target market consists of only people who will purchase your product, but it also accounts for other key players — whether they’re business or individuals — that have any influence on your target market. A target market is generally unified by similar characteristics, including demographic and psychographic traits.

Although we’ve been referring to target market in its singular form, many businesses have more than one target market. You can have a primary target market, which is your main focus, and a secondary target market, which is not quite as influential but still has growth potential.

Of course, there are exceptions to defined target markets. Although consumers who fall in a higher income bracket are more likely to purchase specialty coffee from Starbucks, they may favor Dunkin’ Donuts. And while upper-class, health-conscious individuals gravitate toward Whole Foods, they may very well prefer Publix. Nonetheless, it’s important to know who you are marketing to.

Quality over quantity

It’s natural to want your brand to broadly appeal to many different types of people. However, small businesses can better compete with larger companies when they define smaller, more specific target audiences. Targeting a specific market doesn’t mean you’re excluding people that don’t meet your criteria. It means you’re directing your marketing dollars and brand message to an audience that will most likely increase your ROI.

Defining a target market not only cuts your marketing costs, but it helps you determine your marketing mix, also referred to as the 4 P’s — product, price, place, and promotion. Essentially, the 4 P’s ensure you’re promoting the right product in the right place at the right time.

Begin with your value proposition

Marketers often get caught up in minor details, including fonts, colors, and designs. Will the black text look best on a yellow background? Is this logo placement too small?

But if you don’t know your audience, focusing on these small details will not do you any good. Getting to know your audience — their interests, hobbies, likes, and dislikes — will help you develop a unique value proposition that will pique their interest in your brand.

For instance, let’s say you sell technology software to computer programmers. This small amount of information already gives you considerable insights into your audience’s demographics and psychographics, which we will discuss more in-depth in a little bit. You can target your audience by occupation, location, income level, and other relevant variables.

To generate a value proposition that resonates with your target audience, start by asking yourself a few questions:

What problem does my product or service solve for my consumer?
What can consumers gain from my business over our competitors?
What pain points can my business help my consumer overcome?

Knowing the value you add to consumers’ lives and how your brand can best serve them will allow you to cater to their specific needs.

Paint a picture of your ideal customer

Depending on the nature of your business, your product or service will inherently attract a certain type of person. This could be something specific — like whether they’re married, divorced, or single — or something broader, like whether they make impulse purchases or not. Digging deeper into demographic and psychographic characteristics will help you narrow in on your target customer.

- Demographics are quantitative, which means they have a purely defined answer. They focus on external and physical factors and are based on measurable characteristics, such as:

Age
Location
Gender
Income level/buying power
Education level
Marital or family status
Occupation
Ethnic background

- Psychographics are qualitative, and they focus on psychological factors that vary in degree. They are more personal characteristics of a person, including:

Interests
Hobbies
Personality
Attitudes
Values
Behaviors
Spending habits
Brand interactions

Psychographics help you determine how your business offering fits into the lifestyles of those in your target market. Are they active or sedentary? Do they tend to make impulse purchases or very intentional ones?

Be sure to weigh demographic and psychographic information equally. While demographic information will tell you the type of person that will purchase your product, psychographic information goes a little further by explaining the reasoning behind their purchase behavior. Both types of information can help inform your marketing efforts as well.

Do consumer research

If you’re doing content marketing right, conducting preliminary market research should take just as much time — if not more time — as creating the content itself. Gathering metrics is a great way to pinpoint promising target markets. Consumer information might come from some of the following sources:

Social Media: Analyzing social media analytics is a great way to gather data about your customers. Just about every platform has some sort of built-in analytic program that offer metrics related to engagement and awareness. There’s Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and LinkedIn Page Analytics to name a few. Third-party tools like Hootsuite and Buffer can also give you insights into your social media engagement.
Website Analytics: Using tools like Google Analytics, you can analyze your audience composition and target high-value users. Google Analytics, for example, has an in-depth Demographics and Interests report that gives you a breakdown of your website audience by age, gender, and most common interests. You can identify which types of consumers generate the highest conversion rate, revenue, and engagement, and use this information in retargeting campaigns.
Surveys: You can conduct surveys through a variety of channels, from social media to email lists to community boards. Or if you have room in your budget, you can outsource a marketing firm to help you with surveying and gathering preliminary data. Surveys generally include a mix of demographic and behavioral questions. Whether you survey family, friends, acquaintances, or strangers, the more diverse insights you can obtain, the better.
Focus Groups: Although they don’t receive as much attention as other forms of market research, focus groups are still widely popular — $2.2 billion was spent worldwide on conducting focus groups in 2017. Focus groups are a qualitative method of audience analysis, and their purpose is to drive conversations about your brand and business offerings. Like surveys, you can recruit participants for focus groups from social media, community boards, and other relevant channels.
Review Mining: What’s more convenient than data that’s already readily available to you? Take a minute and sift through any reviews you may have received on Facebook, Google, or other product review sites. This is a form of feedback analysis, which will help you identify the needs and frustrations of your customers.

However tedious it may be, gathering insightful data and metrics about your target market is vital to your marketing success. Without investing time in research, you may pour hours into content creation that doesn’t resonate with your audience.

Create buyer personas

If you’ve been in the marketing space for a while, you have probably heard varying opinions about buyer personas, which are semi-fictionalized profiles that carry the characteristics of your target audience. Some say they’re a mistake and overhyped, and some say the exact opposite — that their underutilized.

Despite these conflicting claims, it’s true that creating accurate buyer personas equips you with valuable ammunition to reach your target audience. Issues with buyer personas usually stem from making your personas too vague or too specific.

For instance, an overly vague buyer persona would be “adult men” or even “small business owners.” Conversely, an overly specific buyer persona would be “recently divorced lawyers with two toddlers, a cat, and a house on the lake.” You get the idea.

A proper buyer persona includes two key components:

Buyer Profile: This is your ideal customer defined by their demographic and psychographic characteristics.
Buyer Insights: These consist of buyer’s feelings, motivations, and expectations that trigger your customers to take action or make a purchase.

Now that you know you need buyer personas, how many of them should you create? Fewer than you may think. While some businesses may truly have as many as 10 personas, it’s normally better to start small.

To give you an idea of some that meet the mark, these are some buyer personas McDonald’s could have:

Cash-stripped college students
Young, urban-dwelling families
Traveling businessmen

Similarly, some of Apple’s buyer personas may include the following:

Business professionals that use technology to perform their job better
Tech-savvy millennials interested in the newest technology trends
High-level executives looking to integrate Apple products into their companies

As you can see from these examples, these buyer personas all have different needs and motivations for buying the same product. Apple may appeal to some due to its business capabilities, and it may appeal to others because of its always-evolving nature. Nonetheless, it captures multiple personas.

Once you establish your buyer personas, you can take a more efficient approach to marketing your brand to fit the needs of each segment. However, don’t simply set and forget these personas. Just as your business grows and evolves, your buyer personas should do the same. Make it a goal to refresh your buyer persona research every 18-24 months.

Takeaways:

Knowing your audience helps you personalize your marketing efforts, empathize with your clientele, and create messages that drive sales. The more you know your target market, the easier it is to turn your leads into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into brand loyalists.

How To Find Your Target Audience For Guaranteed Success