How to Target Your Key Audience

Given the current economic state and the amount of competition businesses face, having a well-defined target audience is more important than ever; no one can afford to target everyone. 

Small businesses can effectively compete with large companies by targeting their niche market. But, how do you define the people most likely to buy your products or services?

Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is the first and most essential step towards success for any company or business.

Your target audience is basically your potential customers, or the customers who are most likely to buy your product or services. Companies need to target a market with whom they can communicate with – a group of people with the same level of education, goals, interests, problems, etc, that will need the product or service they are selling.

If a business targets people who are not interested in their products or services, they might get more traffic to site for example, but it won’t drive sales or conversions.

The most commonly used data to define the target audience of a company are:

• Age
• Gender
• Education background
• Purchasing power
• Social class
• Location
• Consumption habits

For example, if you had a business that sells educational toys, your target audience might be children, mothers, education specialists or teachers. A gambling business’ target audience would definitely not be people younger than 18.

There is no point trying to reach everyone in order to increase your chances of sales and profit. It will actually cost more and decrease your profit margins in the long run.

Personas are profiles of your target audience that would make ideal customers. A persona involves much deeper and more detailed research than the target audience since it includes:

• Personal characteristics
• Purchasing power
• Lifestyle
• Interests
• Engagement in social networks
• Professional information

Choosing your target audience

Different consumers have different needs and intent; if you do not define your target audience and just go after everyone, you’re less likely to pinpoint the key requirements of the people most likely to require your products or services and, as such, cater to a more general audience who do not need your products or services.

To define your target audience, you need to answer the following questions:

1. Who are they?
2. What are their biggest problems?
3. Where do they find their information?
4. What is the benefit of your product or service?
5. What do they dislike?
6. Who do they trust?

It’s important not to break down your target too much; you can have more than one niche market. By answering these key questions however, you can hoan in on the people most likely to buy your products or services. But where can you gather this information?

How we can help

Acuant’s global marketing solutions enable businesses to truly understand their customers and their customers’ unique characteristics.

Our engine analyses all of the available data points from a customer’s digital footprint, returning insights on geo-tags, interests, likes and hobbies, affluence score, estimated date of pay and more. All of which can be utilised to accurately and effectively personalise your marketing efforts.

Consumers are tired of seeing the same content and receiving the same offers as everyone else.

With Acuant Identity’s Alternative and Social Data, you have real-time, meaningful insights at your fingertips and can tailor your marketing to ensure that everything your consumers see is relevant, based on life events, interests and hobbies, when and where they go on holiday, their personality and when they’re online.

All this and more enables you to truly tailor your marketing to enhance engagement retention cross-sell and upsell personalise your user experience with profile personalisation.

Book a demo today and see for yourself how powerful our suite of marketing personalisation solutions are.