A target market is the specific group of people a product, service, or even website actively targets and aims to appeal to. This group is a foundational part of any professional venture.
Choosing an interested group makes marketing and gaining popularity much easier. On the other hand, trying to appeal to an inherently disinterested group can be a death sentence for an ad campaign or website. Before you start marketing or begin the launch process, you need to define your audience and have a legitimate rationale behind your choice of focus.
How to Identify Your Target Market
Before you identify your audience, you need to zoom out and figure out your target market, which is simply the group of people that your work and advertisements will realistically reach and be used by. Oftentimes, you will have multiple; you should separate these into primary and secondary markets, as this will make it easier to determine your angle when advertising and creating.
To identify your target market or markets, you need to ask the following questions:
- What problem am I solving?
- Who is most affected by this problem most?
- Who buys, uses, or browses products, services, or sites similar to mine?
By answering these questions, you will have an accurate idea of the people who will look at and engage with your product.
For example, say you’re offering content writing services through a blogging website that publishes posts on content creation. The problem you are solving is lack of content on someone else’s website, making those most affected other website owners. Even more specifically, the people using similar services are those who lack a strong presence on the web due to low content volume or notoriety. Putting these pieces together, the primary market of your hypothetical service and site is website owners lacking in quality content and an online presence; a secondary market might be novice content writers who are looking at your blog articles to learn the craft.
Once your markets are established, it’s time to narrow it down to your audience.
How to Define a Target Audience
Defining your target audience is to find a specific, relevant demographic within your primary and secondary markets who you can effectively aim advertisements, products, and services towards. There are two notable ways to do this when starting up, one long-term and the other short-term. Which way should you choose? That depends, do you want to wait for a while after release to find your unique audience, or do you want to start marketing for your target audience at release?
I Want to Determine My Target Audience After Release
The benefit of determining post-release is data; you will have hard numbers and a base of consumers you can consult, survey, and interview to figure out the kinds of people who actually use your product, service, or website most and why. When using this method, the following unique options are available to you when determining your main audience:
● Client Interviews and Surveys: Using questionnaires, interviews, or surveys, you can gather data on those most interested and engaged with your product. How old are they? Where do they live? Why do they enjoy what you have to offer in particular? Why are you over a competitor?
● Analytics: You can use analytics through Google Analytics or other tools to figure out geography, device type, and more about the people looking at your service or product.
● Clearly Define Less Interested Groups: A lack of data with some consumers is a story in and of itself. Who isn’t filling out your questionnaires and surveys? What locations don’t look at your website?
Taking these actions will give you a very clear picture of who uses your service or product, where they are, when and how they use it, and maybe even why they use it. Vital information like this can narrow down a target market about website owners with lacking content to an audience of young US-based WordPress users who value convenience and the ability to schedule appointments on mobile.
I Want to Determine My Target Audience Before Release
Appealing to your audience pre-release will help you gain popularity and attract sales faster than doing otherwise. While you won’t have much in raw data, there are still things you could do to figure out who you need to market towards early.
● Analyze your Competition: What audiences is the competition targeting? Is their focus effective? Taking a deep look at what is and isn’t working in your contemporaries will give you valuable insight into who to shoot for when creating and advertising.
● Look at Studies and Publicly Available Data: Examine studies and publicly available data on who gets or uses what and why. Even without data specific to you, this will give you plenty of information on those likely to desire your service.
Analytical thinking and research is key. Doing deep dives into what is working and the people within your markets will let you get a head start on marketing towards your main audience.
While either method could work at the start, it is important to note that you should be using actions from both to achieve success. A successful online presence requires doing deep research early and collecting data to analyze after launch; try to define a target audience early and appeal to them. If that doesn’t work, pivot, and use product-specific data to find a more suitable group to advertise towards.
For marketing advice and assistance on gaining real traffic for your product, service, or website, you won’t find anyone better than Walsh Marketing Group! Contact us now for a free consultation.
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Works Cited
Who Are You Marketing To?
https://readytrainingonline.com/articles/target-market/
Steps to Find Your Target Audience
https://www.marketingevolution.com/marketing-essentials/target-audience
Target Market 101: Definition, How to Identify It + Campaign Tips
Aim and Fire! How to Identify Your Target Audience
https://www.business.com/articles/identify-your-target-audience/
