How to define the target audience and why it’s necessary

Studying the target audience helps you to find out what is important for your users. Our article tells how to determine your target audience and form a buyer portrait.

The target audience (TA) is the group of users who are likely to respond to your advertising activities due to their interest in your product. Studying your target audience helps you better understand what is important to your users. It also helps gather which criteria they use when choosing products. Tanya Bondar, the marketer at “Inweb” and owner of an online Etsy shop, explains why it is important to know and define your target audience as well as how to create a customer profile for this demographic.

Why You Must Know Your Target Audience

Correctly defining your target audience is one of the most fundamental challenges in marketing and entrepreneurship. Marketing itself is basic common sense. By understanding people's behavioral patterns, identifying the mechanisms that influence decision-making, and incorporating products or services into these systems.

To sell something to a person, you first need to understand why they want it. From there to communicate as clearly as possible how the product or service will solve their need. This is where defining the target audience will be required.

Of course, everyone is different. We can't tell you the exact name of our first client, or how many children the seventeenth customer has, or even who the thirty-fifth purchaser works with. But statistics are a kind of science. Having defined an approximate portrait of a potential customer, we will be able to understand them much better. We will know what he cares about, what criteria he uses when choosing goods, and what he is willing to buy. We will get answers to these types of questions: What message will interest your potential customer? What product will solve their need? What are they willing to ignore and what will they pay attention to?

For both necessities and emotional purchases, the capacity to understand the customer's decision-making process is key to the marketing strategy. It is the principle by which you should build your communication with the customer. Focus on what is important to them and avoid wasting your budget on what is unnecessary.

How to Define Your Target Audience

Start from the Product

It is necessary to identify the tasks and functions of the product. To understand why the client needs it and what needs he can fulfill with its help. Carry out a test purchase from yourself, or even better — from competitors. Compare by using a similar product in practice and find its strengths and weaknesses.

Study Popular Sales Statistics

Even if you are beginning to choose what kind of business to start, you need to think about finding your target customers. After all, it depends on these people how many sales you will have. If you understand your customers correctly and identify the issues that matter to them, you can communicate to them why they need your product.

Creating a Buyer Profile

Here are some of the main characteristics that will help you get to know your potential customer better:

• Gender

• Age

• Location

• Field of activity

• Ability to pay

These characteristics are fundamental because they will directly affect the understanding of how a person makes decisions. Determining the main buyer characteristics will tell you through which communication channels to contact them, in which communities to search, how to set up logistics, and which promotions and events to hold.

This can be accomplished with nearly any product.

You have to start advertising to them based on their gender, age, ability to make payments with ease, and the locations where delivery and provision of the service is possible.

Interests

You can find fans of certain hobbies and activities for more accurate targeting.

Example: Tents are geared towards anyone who is into fishing, hunting, tourism, and camping.

If your product does not provide a clear connection to the hobby, that will be determined by the general overview of the audience. For example; Young people may be into music and computer games or high rollers that may enjoy golf and yachting. In the overall picture they will be helpful in identifying people who are potentially interested in your product.

Values Such as Life Principles and Attitudes

Here it is a little more complicated because it is no longer a straightforward personal characteristic. Understanding a potential customer's life stance can help you formulate your message more clearly and direct it towards the target.

Example: Eco-friendly products for vegans.

Problems that are Obvious or Uncertain

This can be one of the most effective methods in positioning a product or service. Sometimes it is not so important how old your target customer is or where he lives, but what problems he suffers from and what task you can solve for him.

Example: Medications, pest control methods, or highly specialized shoe cleaners.

Objectives

It is crucial to understand what the person needs and give it to them in the most profitable way possible.

Example: An inspiring travel tour at a low price or a training course that says "Become an IT specialist in three months!"

How to Identify the Underlying Target Audience

I have a small shop on “Etsy.com” whose target audience is very unclear. We sell gifts and most often focus not on the direct consumers of our goods but on their environment.

To understand who will buy a gift, you must forget the product and decide the customer's needs. Identify their problems and fix them. For example; the challenge may be locating the gift, packaging or delivering. If we want to solve the problem by finding a present, we need to give the product a specific name such as: "a gift for so-and-so's occasion". When going through the options of what to give as a gift, the customer may not realize that your product is suitable for them. However, by typing "gift for..." into a search engine, it may pop up this way.

Other needs should be handled similarly: have a standard of gift wrapping the items, add an option for a free greeting card that is delivered to any address, or offer the option of not enclosing a check but instead paying online.

Conclusion

Identifying the target audience is extremely important for any blossoming business. After all, it is the satisfaction of a customer's needs, whether rational or emotional, that lies at the core of successful business ventures. It is not terribly difficult to accomplish. The main thing is to understand the value of your own product and be able to clearly explain it to the customer.