Define Your Target Audience - Marketing to the Right Crowd

Marketing and sales go hand in hand with your goods and services. Long before you sell anything, you need to understand who you are selling to and why. One of the critical skills every marketer must have is defining their target audience.

Your target audience is also known as your ideal customer. That one perfect person that, all things equal, is the absolute epitome of why you make what you make or do what you do. Your target audience drives everything from what you make, how you make it, how you market it, and how you deliver it.

Your target audience helps you:

• Define your purpose
• Define your goods and services
• Determine what you develop
• Maximize your marketing
• Focus your sales efforts

Identifying the target audience is the first step in creating your business because it helps you determine the many choices you must make.

How do you define your target audience?

Ask yourself these questions:

Question: Who do I want to serve?

Question: What is their typical life like (personal or professional)?

Question: What problems do they need to be solved, or what is their pain?

The key to choosing your target market lies in the details. The more information you obtain about your ideal market, the more efficient and easier it will be to create goods and services to meet their needs. That requires fine-tuning your answers to these questions. Take a look:

Who do you want to serve? The typical answer could be “women,” but that is too broad an answer. Women, in general, are too broad a category to create effective marketing. A better answer might be - Adult women with a college education in the workplace and earn over $50k annually.

What is their typical life like (personal or professional)? The standard answer might be - Married with children. A better answer might be - Married with children under the age of ten who are trying to balance work and home without feeling guilty or burned out.

What problems do they need to be solved? An answer could look like - Feeling better about themselves, but it misses the mark. A better answer is - Find solutions for managing work and home for working mothers who don’t have time to prepare nutritious foods for dinner.

The more you can hone in on your target audience and determine who they are, what they want, and how to solve their problems, the easier it will be to create goods and services that will be easily marketed and sold to your ideal clients.

Marketers need a lot of critical skills to be successful in the marketplace. Deciding who to sell to and what to sell to them is one of the first skills they need to develop. Distinguishing your target audience is an essential step. All future marketing decisions arise from this step.