WEBPRO can help you truly understand your business target market, or as we will discuss below, target markets. Knowing your market and continually monitoring your market is crucial to making powerful business decisions, especially in regard to your website, content and especially in marketing. Avoid wasted investments and increase sales potential by following our free guidance below. Or contact our team for a more personalised discussion.
What is a business target audience?
A business's target audience is the market it wishes to sell its products and services to. It could relate to the location, age, gender, social class or even the background of an individual.
This might be very obvious to some business owners. For example, a locksmith’s target audience will be homeowners and sometimes other markets such as estate agents. But some businesses might offer a wider range of services that are only suitable to people of different ages. For example, a financial advice service might offer first time buyer mortgage advice to people under the age of 35, whereas they could also offer lifetime mortgage advice to people over 55.
Therefore, the business target audience can change quite drastically depending on the exact product or service being offered. Some businesses will have just one or two target markets, whereas others could have many more.
How to uncover your target audience
To properly uncover your target market(s), you need to answer three important questions. These are:
- Who are they?
- Where are they?
- What are they looking for?
The first question should be easy to answer for most businesses. Although it may take time to work out your exact target market for individual products or services. You may also want to consider how your target market may have changed over time, or how it could change in the future. If you’re unsure of your target market(s) for whatever reason, it’s worth speaking to a marketing expert or completing market research.
The second question doesn’t relate to where they are located, as this is part of working out your target market. The question actually asks where are they hanging out and where you can reach them. In online marketing, this could refer to what social media platforms they use most frequently. And in offline marketing terms, this question could refer to the events your market attends or where they are most likely to see an advertisement when going about their daily lives.
Our third question in uncovering your target market asks what they are looking for. Do they require convenience? Do they require remote services? By answering questions like these, you don’t just get an understanding of who the target market is from a demographic perspective, but you might be able to tap into the typical personality of your target market as well.
Why do you need to know your target audience?
A clear understanding of your target audience is essential for any business that wants to be successful. It will help you come up with strategies to penetrate your market and make more sales. Moreover, knowing your target market in detail can avoid wasted investments, especially in marketing.
Here are some of the more specific reasons to spend time understanding your target market:
- It should influence branding
- It should influence website design
- It should influence content creation, including written and visual content
- It should influence what marketing strategies you use and which ones you avoid
- It should influence what social media platforms to use and which ones are a wasted investment for your business
Recap: Do you really know your target market? Even if you think you do, it might be worth re-evaluating who your market is right now, especially across different products and services. You also need to know where they hang out and what they demand. All of this information is invaluable when you make investments in content, marketing, web design and social media. Without doing the research first, you could be wasting money each month.
WEBPRO Knows
There is research to suggest that 21% of all marketing budgets are wasted due to relying on assumptions or poor-quality data. This is another reason why knowing your exact market is so crucial.
