When selling anything online, it’s important to know your target market. With online marketing, you effectively have a global audience to target your products or service to. So, it will be much more efficient and effective if you know who to put your marketing message in front of.
If you use the scatter gun approach, you just run advertising to everyone and hope for the best. This isn’t the best approach, because you’ll be running paid advertising to many groups of people who aren’t at all interested in your product.
While the scatter gun approach can give you data, it’s an expensive way to gather it and there will be a lot of wasted marketing budget. If you get clear on who your “perfect” customers are, you can be more like a sniper with your marketing; and less like a battlefront soldier. It will save you a lot of money on your marketing campaigns, if you get this right.
How To Know Your Target Market
Depending on your particular product or service, a target market can be fairly broad. Coca-Cola, for example, sell to a wide range of people. People of all ages and backgrounds buy the drink. But still, there will be a sector of the market which most of their advertising is aimed at, in order to advertise more efficiently. For Coca-Cola, his is mostly younger people who are 12 years old and older. This can often be determined through looking at the bulk of the existing customers.
If you don’t already have customers, look at your product and who it’s the best fit for. A home furnishing store will have a different customer “persona” to Coca-Cola. You would expect the average customer to be in a couple and over 20 years old, for example. See this home decorating retail market plan.
So one of the best ways to determine who your target audience is, is to look closely at the criteria that makes up your existing customers:
- Age range
- Location geographically
- Interests
- pains and problems
- Family situation
- Salary
- Etc.
How To Know Your Target Market – The Buyer “Persona”
A company’s target market can be made up of a large section of people. One way of defining your target market more specifically is through a buyer persona. A buyer persona is also called a customer avatar. It’s a fictional character which represents one of your ideal customers.
If you’re generating a marketing campaign for an online business, it can be a good idea to target a customer avatar. Spending some time getting to know your customer avatar is a good use of your time. It can help you to speak directly to that individual, with your marketing message, through the pains and problems which your product helps them with.
If you try and sell to everyone in your marketing message, it can have the opposite effect. This is because it doesn’t speak directly to the pains and problems which your unique product helps to solve.
Your Products/Service
What pains and problems do your products solve? And who is most likely to benefit from them? Once you know this you should have already narrowed down your target audience. Consider which sub-section of your potential customers are the most likely to need and want your product. Who is it most important to and why.
What assumptions have you made about your target audience, and are these true? Have you tested these assumptions with real marketing and got the data to prove it?
Until you actually run a marketing campaign, and get the feedback to prove or disprove your assumptions, you could be barking up the wrong tree. So, one way to know your target audience is to run campaigns and gather data. You can run paid marketing campaigns to a website or a landing page. Collect data as you start making sales through an email marketing campaign. This is done through tracking and measuring your advertising and sales.
But before you run a campaign, it’s worth considering who your idea customer is, where they live, can they afford your products and what are their pains and problems which you can help to solve.
Get To Know Your Existing Customers
Your existing customers are already putting their money where there mouth is! They already purchased from you. Getting to know why they bought from you is a simple and cheap way of gathering data on your perfect customer and target audience.
Conduct market research with your customers and get to know more about them. As you do, this will tell you more about their pains and problems which your product or business helps them with.
How old are they? What are their interests and passions? How did they find your company? The more you know about your existing customers, and the larger your customer based grows, the more you will understand them and how to find more like them.
Try Different Marketing Strategies
Adwords is a popular marketing strategy for online businesses which lets the marketer target people by their search queries. If you own a hardware store in Lincoln, it’s pretty obvious that you’re a good fit for someone typing “hardware store”, who lives locally to you!
Use Google’s keyword planner to find other keywords which are a good fit for your business.
Facebook and YouTube are great platforms too, which let you target people by a number of criteria:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Income
- Sex
- Groups and connections
- and so on
By targeting certain criteria which are relevant to your business, you can zone in on the type of people who are most suited to your business. Not everyone you advertise to will purchase something from you. If you’re on a budget with your advertising, you’ll want to make it go further by making it more efficient.
At first, as you’re learning marketing, you will tend to spend more because your marketing will be to a larger group of people. As you gather data, and start making sales, you can use this information to learn who is the most likely type of person to buy from you.
How To Know Your Target Market – Summary
The best way how to know your target market is through testing and measuring of your advertising campaigns. Those adverts which don’t generate sales, cut them! Those ones which work the best, keep them running. Learn from your data and test and measure advertising continually.
But before you run any advertising campaign, it’s a good idea to get to know existing customers, if you have any. The better you get to know them, the more you’ll know who to target in your marketing campaigns and this will significantly reduce your cost. You’ll be able to target these kinds of people more specifically with your marketing – saving you a lot of money.
You can also define your target audience through looking closely at your products. What problems and pains do they solve? Who is this mostly likely to impact if they choose to become a customer?
Question your assumptions about your target market. How old are they? Where do they live? Identify your buyer persona, or customer avatar and talk to this fictional character in their language when you create a marketing campaign.
