Ways to reach your genuine Audience.

The biggest mistakes in marketing are to attempt to appeal to everyone at once. Without a target audience, a campaign may come up empty because it casts too wide a net. The most effective way to reach maximum qualified people is to target more specific groups.

WHAT IS A TARGET AUDIENCE?

“There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a higher level contribution to that target market,” marketing author Philip Kotler once said.

A target audience is a specific group of people with shared characteristics who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

Businesses typically use demographic information to define their target audience. Examples of common demographic information include:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Profession
• Income
• Education level
• Marital status

WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT?

Since it is not possible to reach everyone at once, narrowing your focus to a core audience helps you to develop an effective marketing strategy. It helps your company trade a messaging strategy that appeals directly to the type of consumer who is more likely to convert into customers. For example, Facebook Ads allow you to target users according to their interests.

It is also more cost-effective to improve your audience because your campaigns are run on a smaller, more focused scale. Instead of sending direct mail to every local family, you will receive a better return on investment by targeting consumers who may already have an interest in your type of products or services.

HOW TO DEFINE A TARGET AUDIENCE

The first step to structure a successful marketing campaign is defining its target. This process will inform every deliverable from social media marketing posts to email marketing crash.

To get started, you can ask yourself simple questions like:

Are your target customers male or female?

About how old are they?

Where do they live?

What are their interests?

You can answer these questions by following these seven steps:

Examine your current customers

Research the competition

Analyze your product or service

Create buyer personas

Choose demographics to target

Choose personal characteristics to target

Evaluate and revise your segmented audience

Once you have chosen a specific audience, all the other pieces of the puzzle will more easily fall into place because you now have a guide to follow.