6 Quick Questions That Can Help You Define Your Target Audience
You have finally set up your business after several months of preparation, funding and also work hours you can’t account for. You are happy and await customers to make inquiries about your product; then you realize that only a small number of individuals are interested. Perhaps you need to define your target audience more accurately.
The question on your mind right now will be “Where is everybody?” You are not alone with such question, even skilled business owners that have spent a lot of time and money advertising through social platforms online have asked the same questions.
Asking such question is wrong. The first question to ask is “Who do you seek?” before questioning where everyone is hiding. According to Mandy Porta of Inc.com, she wrote:
To build a solid foundation for your business, you must first identify your typical customer and tailor your marketing pitch accordingly.
Hence, the question is how you can understand a customer you have not met?
6 Questions to Define Your Target Audience
You can easily understand your target audience and where direct your marketing strategy using social media through a short exercise with a pen and paper.
1) What’s the age range?
It is unlikely for people between age 10 and 14 to show interest in your updates on social media if you are a car dealer. Likewise, typically more traditional senior consumers won’t show interest in buying the Erdem X H&M collection where fans queued overnight to get their hands on the highly anticipated quirky new line of accessories and fashion items. You can only predict which demographic has a keen interest in your product and financial support from repeat buyers when you understand the age range of your current and potential customers.
2) Where Do Your Prospective Customers Live?
In order to define your target audience the insight of understanding where your customers live should not be left only to local SMEs; you should have knowledge of the location of your potential customer. Both online and offline businesses need to understand their customer’s location to help target effective engagement and advertising via social media.
If you own a business (local business), your interest is to acquire consumers within your work radius that your service will be of importance to. Thus, if you are an electrician in Bangkok, it is very unlikely for people in Singapore or even a city nearby to show interest in your service after viewing your ads or updates on social media.
As an entrepreneur in e-commerce, you can distribute your products across a wider distance. However, you may be restricted in delivering your goods to the other part of the world because you lack the courier facilities to ship your product.
It is advisable you narrow or direct your aim towards suitable locational demographic instead of using all your funds on Pay Per Click as well as adverts on social media that target worldwide; this can help increase your conversion and in the process save cash.
3) What’s Their Gender?
Understanding gender is as vital as understanding the age of your audience. Targeting cosmetic products made for women at men may not be a wrong choice, but you will not benefit from it on the long run; it is more likely that those ads will not convert into sales.
By directing your adverts and updates at women alone, you can minimize the cost of advertising and reinvest funds by targeting existing customers to make another purchase.
Recent updates on social handles like Twitter and Facebook have inbuilt promotion networks that have made it possible to create adverts that target the right sex, as well as location and age group. You can read more about Facebook Ads in our services section.
Which social network platform is suitable for your audience? With Simply Measured’s How to Choose the Best Social Network for Your Audience guide, you can find information on how to improve your social media marketing.
4) What Methods Do You Employ to Advertise Your Product to Potential Customers
You can create adverts and updates on social media that will convert if you understand your demographic.
Before some people are finally convinced to purchase your product, they need to see your products in action over and over again via pictures and videos. You can demonstrate how your product works and also the importance through networks like Periscope and YouTube.
It may take up to 12 weeks for a customer to save money or be convinced to make a purchase if you sell a product (for example, a car) that is a little out of the comfortable purchase range. These consumers are also important as immediate spend clients as long as their lifetime value as a customer is worthy.
Within this period of indecision and saving, you can gently engage them through frequent and funny updates on social media platforms (either Facebook or Twitter) your proposed demographic make use of the most.
In such situations, running an advert continuously and engaging them via social media might be all that is required to land a sale you were most likely to miss.
5) Where Do Your Potential Customers Obtain Information? E.g., News, Social Media, etc.
On a daily basis, over 60% of people make use of social media in the United States. That means in a day, about 180 million persons are scrolling through Instagram, checking news out on twitter as well as chatting up or viewing posts on Facebook.
Ensure your next ad campaign make use of that prime real estate.
At mid-day, lots of individuals worldwide pick up their mobile phones more than 17 times a day. Currently, 65% of grownups are now active on social media. Lots of Americans spend more time on their phones because they don’t want to be kept in the dark or miss out on relevant information .
When you direct your efforts towards the social platforms each audience make use of the most, you can save time required to be omnipresent, and by creating a single cost-effecting promotion on the network the clients you need operate more often.
For instance, Instagram should be your main network if your main demographic are females between age 18-29. Facebook should be perfect for advertising if you are interested in generating leads if you sell many different products as the platform is e-commerce optimized. You can use this report on social networks users to find the right social media platform for your demographic.
6) Which Type of Content Works Best?
In 2015, posting short video clips on Facebook became an increasingly advertising method for many businesses. On the other hand, what if Facebook is not the social network your target audience makes use of? Then, you will be wasting resources promoting contents that people who matter more will not see.
In order to correctly define your target audience, put the behaviors of your prospective customers into consideration, you can have ideas and develop a campaign on social media that will work. All you require may be to use a different social network to reach out the right customer at the appropriate time, i.e., Instagram may be better than Facebook.
For instance, if you sell B2Bor SaaS, you may discover that the videos you uploaded are not up to standard, however, your Tweets are receiving lots of engagement and people clicks through to your blog. Obviously, these type of customers desires a detailed post on your blog. They desire lots of information before they buy your product; this, you won’t find them going through such information on Facebook.
You will find all the information you need to identify the social media network that works better with your audience in 10 Social Media Tips Guide by Hootsuite and recommendation on how to grow your business through social media.
Will time, your notes will turn out to be the demographics required to shape future sales. Also, have in mind that knowledge of gender, age and location is not enough.
They exist people in your target market with specific behaviors from which an average can be used to monitor their general purchase habits.
You will find high-income earners that are unwilling to spend. Alternatively, you will also come across low-income employees willing to purchase unnecessary items to reward themselves every weekend.
Emotional triggers are important for predicting the choices your customers will make. You can lose dramatically if you neglect them. As Jacqueline Curtis of Money Crashers relates in this examination of JCPenney: “In 2012, CEO Ron Johnson decided to try something new: He revamped the store’s image by putting an end to what he called “fake pricing,” … pricing that ended in $0.99, clearance buys, and pricing that was discounted from an inflated number.”
The theory sounds nice. In reality, customers were not buying it. Customers felt they did not get value from making a purchase. Sales dropped significantly.
Buyers think they are getting less value for their money when there is no red line through the supposed original price and a sale price printed beneath. The purchase intentions of JCPenney’s clients were apparently driven by their emotion, and the company lost about half their share price and 5 billion dollars under twelve months because they ignored those signs.
You can prevent similar fate of JCPenney by understating your customer’s emotional triggers.
Bringing Your Customers to Life
Although you require statistics, you are not a statistical value, neither are your customers.
You may quickly forget that there is a person behind each statistic when you study the numbers in each group you have identified. That person is same as you.
While developing your strategy for social media, understanding the significance of your work will be much easier when you have a person in mind while developing it.
“Joseph will love these speakers.”
“Anita would purchase these shoes without thinking about it.”
By attaching names to the faces of our target population, we humanize and eliminate difficulties in relating and reasonably predict the behavior of your target audience.
For Shopify, an e-commerce network revealed How to Build Buyer Personas For Better Marketing on their post, a strategy for personality building worth imitating.
Drafting your next campaign will be easier by printing off personal small profiles in your possession.
Compare to Competitors
After studying your statistics and you still find it difficult to predict your customer’s behavior, checking your competitors as an easy method to find out ways that work. You can find out what will work for your target audience by learning about the success of the company in your field. Such information is also useful if your major competitors are active on online social platforms much longer than you; you can easily assess their strategy and make improvements on them.
Small business and entrepreneurs that cannot meet up with the massive marketing finances of competitors, they can develop a cohesive marketing strategy easily by allowing the opposition do all the work.
Conclusion
You can improve your aim with these 6 simple questions. Having them in mind, once you define your target audience you are confident of hitting the right target instead of firing at will.
Having knowledge of your target audience, who they are, their social network, and purchase behaviors will allow you increase total sales by developing an effective social media strategy.
