When you're selling a product or service, you need to find your target audience, or who you are selling to. This is extremely important when looking at your marketing strategy. By finding your target audience, you discover who you want to market to. So how do you figure out your target audience? In the next part of our branding series, we're breaking down the steps.
When looking at your target audience, you need to ask questions to help decipher who you are marketing to. Here are some examples:
What do they do?
How old are they?
How much money do they make?
What's their level of education?
Are they married?
Do they have a family?
What do they do in their free time?
All of these different questions will help you figure out who your audience is. The answers can be different depending on your product or service. You might market to women who are in college as well as men who are retired. This is a great way to get a feel of who you want to buy your products or use your services.
Once you have answered the questions above, a great tool to utilize is a buyer persona. This is a fake profile of a customer you want to have. It is good to have more than one, but don’t overwhelm yourself. Marketing to a few specific audiences, determined by your personas, who want to buy your product is better than marketing to everyone and having no one to buy your product.
Here’s an example of a buyer persona:
As you can see, a buyer persona can be as simple as giving a few details about a member of your audience. You can make your buyer's persona as detailed or as simple as you want.
Finding your target audience will go a long way into shaping your marketing strategy. It will help you target your content to meet the specific goals of your audience.
For more information on branding, check out the first part of our branding series:
Dani James is a Marketing Specialist and writer for Atwill Media. She has a bachelor’s degree in Strategic Communications from Arkansas State University with focuses in Public Relations, Advertising, and Social Media Management.
When not working, she enjoys spending time with her family, reading a good book, and watching The Office.