How to identify your brand’s target audience?
Bringing out your new brand – service or product – comes with a big risk. Understanding the market environment will help you reduce that risk and allow you to focus your brand marketing efforts in the most cost-efficient way possible. Knowing the right target audience for your brand is one of the most vital pieces of marketing strategy. Broad enough strategies are typically less successful than highly nice or targeted market sectors.
That said, before you begin marketing efforts for your brand, you should define your target audience – the exact group that you can expect to purchase your services and products. It will encompass your potential and existing customers. 
That’s quite different from defining your target market, which involves anyone who could be interested in your services or products. Your target audience is the group of people on which you want to focus your brand marketing efforts – be it through an advertisement, a digital marketing campaign, or on social media through social media platforms.
A recent survey from Databox even proved that target audience research was most helpful with social media marketing, content marketing and SEO efforts.
As you focus your efforts on your target audience and its pain points, you can come up with more effective content and focus advertisements with a reasonable marketing message for each of those sectors. It’s critical to understand that not all messages resonate the same way with different groups of people. To be more precise, marketers overwhelmingly agree that personalization encourages advanced customer experience. On the other hand, not knowing this valuable information could cost you a lot of wasted time and money.
Conduct market research
Market research will allow you to meet your consumers where they are. As our world (both analogue and digital) becomes louder and demands more and more of your attention, this proves invaluable. Yet services Opinipoll can help you understand your consumer’s pain points, problems, and desired solutions and aptly create your service or product to naturally appeal to them.
Through market research, you will obtain insights into a wide variety of things that impact your bottom line, including:
- Where your current customers and your target audience conduct their service or product research.
- Which of your competitors your targeted audience look to for options, information, or purchases
- What’s trending in the eyes of your buyers or your industry
- Who builds your market and what their challenges are
- What influences conversations and purchases among your target audience
Understand the purchase path and pain points
Every service or product is meant to fulfil a particular need. But why is it that only a few are an immediate hit among people and the rest pass by unnoticed? The real reason behind every product’s victory is its ability to solve its consumer’s pain points.
Besides the consumer’s actual pain point that urges the user to look for an immediate solution, they experience various pain points throughout and after purchase.
- Productivity and convenience
- Shopping journey
- Financial
From low-quality to high pricing to post-sales experience or broken links, the companies that successfully mitigate every pain point and bring a wholesome customer experience stay above the game irrespective of business.
If you want your service or product to be on-trend and make your audience stick to it, make sure you:
- Survey customers with the right questions
- Get your sales team talking
- Check out online reviews
- Take a look at your competitors
Employ multi-segment differentiated marketing
Instead of broad messages and mass marketing that will likely fail to ring with the largest and diverse audiences, market segmentation allows brands to discover a more detailed target audience within a market to focus their market endeavors.
Therefore, multi-segmented marketing is the method of separating a target market into multiple segments to target each of those segments with a different product or message. Brands use this type of marketing to sell the same service/product to different segments, personalizing messaging and content to fit their definitely-defined needs and wants. Brands that sell multiple products may also use multiple segment marketing to divide their efforts and strategies to appeal to target audiences for each product line.
When consider segmenting your market, make sure you look after:
Size
Segments that are too small will bring a smaller return. Although you get 100% of the section to respond to, it will be too small to make a difference. Instead, each sector should be large enough to be profitable, considering that it’s a great chance to achieve 100% in any segment.
Identifiable
A multi-segmented marketing strategy should hone in a certain consumer characteristic. Therefore, your segments must be identifiable, distinct based on certain criteria, and measurable.
Growth potential
A stagnant segment, with little promise of future growth, can make tap out quickly. Make sure you identify segments with growth opportunities so you can get more long-term bang for your buck.
Affordability
A multi-segmented market, while tempting, simply isn’t cost-effective to go after. Make sure you’ve finalized a cost analysis to determine whether the investment is worth it. However, keep in mind that some investments will take a bit longer to reap their benefits.
Reachability
If you plan to segment your market, consider whether your brand has the promotion channels and distribution needed to reach the target markets. If so, go for it. In case not, collaborate with the business to determine whether channels can be extended to reach them and if not, this market segment doesn’t worth your money, not your time.
Aligned
Your brand’s values, image and objectives are important. Your audience is a reflection of these elements. Ensure the market you want to segment lines up with who your brand is and the kind of audience you want to make it yours.
Responsiveness
Is your current target market likely to respond to your marketing messages? That said, you need to understand their response history to similar marketing strategies. Do they follow, like and share similar messages already?
