This article helps you define your target audience/target customer. That will improve your guidance to your sales and marketing teams. In turn, this will improve revenue.
To learn more about your customers, segment them into small groups. Each group exhibits common, unique attributes across its members. Understanding their uniqueness helps you customize your interactions with them to get better results.
So, what attributes do I use to define my target audience?
Target audience attributes are broadly categorized under demographics and psychographics.
Defining audiences using Demographic information
We aim to define attributes such as age, race, ethnicity, and gender. Attributes such as income level, educational qualification, marital status, employment, number of children, and number of people living in the same household boost the quality of our definition..
Psychographic information of your target audience
Psychographic information is also termed AIO. AIO stands for activities, interests, and opinions. This information helps us understand the collective frame of mind for that group. Armed with this knowledge, we can customize our messaging to resonate with the group. This data can be collected both by surveys and via qualitative studies. Remember that these attributes vary with time, and hence, it is often wise to use an off-the-shelf study.
A good target audience definition is specific and is a combination of both demographics and psychographic attributes.
Examples of defined target audiences
Let us consider these examples for a business that sells noise-proofing solutions.
- Parents, 35 – 44, with at least one kid, live in high-density residential areas near highways and major traffic routes. They typically search for noise-blocking curtains and blocking highway noise.
- Empty nesters, 64 and above, retired, living in high-density residential areas with top 50% percentile income. They typically search for noise-blocking curtains and blocking highway noise.
So how does this help?
Sales teams can now engage with these two groups by customizing their sales pitch and providing relevant examples of similar customers they have served. It helps your marketing teams to have two unique campaigns where they can:
- Choose relevant advertising channels.
- Customize their advertising images.
- Use relevant adcopies.
Conducting this target customer definition activity for our clients has helped us improve the efficiency of their sales and marketing operations. Professional input improves the quality of your target customer definition. This high quality is important for your marketing team and thus enables smarter and more effective advertising for you.
- Helps you map your target audience on advertising platforms.
- Ensures that the definition is broad enough to be used on your advertising platforms.
Read on for more elaboration.
Ability to map your defined target audience.
Let us say we want to target users who exchange business cards. This definition is 100% NOT targetable on any advertising platform. To make it targetable, you may redefine them as job titles such as business development. With this new definition, your customer is now targetable on LinkedIn.
Ensure that the definition is broad enough.
All advertising platforms have specific size criteria so that these platforms can show your ads to a defined audience. Suppose your campaign manager used business development and found that the target audience size was too small. He may consider adding titles such as sales consultant and so on.
So, there you have it. These are the “basics of the basic” target audience definition. This activity will help you grow your business. With growth, you will learn more about your customers and must redefine your target customers regularly. You may also consider adding new definitions of target customers to expand your business.
