Finding the right target audience is one of the holy grails of marketing. Get your message to the right person at the right time, and you've much more chance of seeing your brand win. But how do you go about finding the ultimate target customer? And what do you do when you know who they are? Read on to find out more...
Step 1
It might surprise you to know that the first step in finding your target audience isn't to actually do any targeting. But it's true. The very fist step in finding a target customer is to do research. And lots of it. For the biggest competitive advantage, you need to know as much about the market as possible. This isn't the place for conversations about how the CEO "already knows who the customer is thankyouverymuch." Instead, it's time to get out there and get talking to people.
Step 2
Next up, you should consider blending research methods. Talking to your own customers is a great place to start. But it shouldn't be the end of the story either. Your customers are biased, and they're also unrepresentative of the whole market. And we're guessing it's the whole market you'd like to talk to? So depending on the market, there are other things you can do. On the qualitative side you could run a focus group with people who don't (yet) buy your stuff. And on the quantitative side, you could run a survey, or get access to third party data. Blending your research with others, and qualitative and quantitate data is the best way to get a grip on what's going on.
Step 3
So you've spoken to people and started to blend those data sources together. Now what? Well not all customers are equal. So the problem with the research is we can't just lump it all into a big pot. So we need to break them down into groups. This is segmentation. To cut the marketing cake into slices, we need to look for all the differences that come up between different people. Chances are, if you ask two people what they're looking for, they will have different needs, drivers and spending habits. And when you start to look into it, there will be more of some than the others. This gives you an extraordinary advantage. You can then begin to work out who is spending money on what, and how much they're spending.
Step 4
Until now we haven't really thought about your brand. That's because we've been trying to build a picture of the competitive map. Now we have the map in hand, we can decide what to do with it. At this point you have to consider a few things. Which of these slices of the marketing pie are worth the most to us? Where can we play? What customers tend to not use us? No brand has unlimited money, so you need to know who your market isn't as much as who it is. The best fit with the most potential for impact is where you want to be. Place all your chips down on that target customer for at least 12 months, and see what happens.
Step 5
There's a final consideration when it comes to thinking about your target market. How much budget do you want to spend trying to talk to the whole market, and how much on a specific target market? Every brand wants to grow, so at some point there is an inevitable need to speak to the entire market. This helps to nurture a pipeline of future customers. How much time and money you spend on this that is will depend on your market. It could be anything from 0-70%, so looking at your market average is a good starting point.
So there you have it. If you start by researching your market in many ways, you'll build an all important map of the market. Build on that by analysing which of them is the most valuable to you. And then you can decide where to spend your hard earned marketing budget for the year ahead.
