All businesses need clients to grow. But how much time are you or your sales team spending connecting, nurturing, and trying to convert leads? Are you spending time on leads that convert? Or are you trying to sell everyone possible?
For most businesses, particularly in small business marketing, it’s essential to narrow down your sales funnel and limit your time to your target audience.
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience refers to the consumers that are most likely to be interested in and purchase your product or service. Therefore, it’s the people you most want to see your campaigns and learn about your business. Your target audience could be defined by age, gender, income, location, interests, professions, skills, etc.
Plus, it’s possible to have more than one target audience. If you are a financial consultant, a target audience might be a married man over 55, living within 50 miles of your office, and having over $1 million in assets. However, you might also want to target parents prepping for their kid’s college. That target audience would look a lot different – perhaps 40s, with high school-age kids who have an income of over $100,000 a year.
In these instances, you’d want to create unique campaigns specifically designed for your target audiences. That way, you can connect with people interested in your services in ways that resonate with them.
Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience
Are you convinced yet? Defining your target audience can help you know how, when, and where to market your services and goods. But how do you find your target audience?
You’ll stop wasting time and money on people who simply aren’t in your market. Not everyone is a viable customer, and that’s ok. Spend your efforts on those who are.
You’ll improve options and services. When you know your audience, you can focus on them and develop services, educational events, and webinars that cater specifically to their needs. That means you’ll convert even more people, they’ll be happy consumers, and they’ll refer you to their friends. And that means you’ll build a more substantial referral base.
How to Find Your Target Audience
Ok, so now we know that we want to know our target audiences, and we’ve put it in our small business marketing plan. But how, precisely, do we determine who our ideal audience is?
1. Review your current consumers. Is there a similarity in age, gender, location, income level, etc.? Where do they hang out, what do they like to do, and what can you capitalize on?
2. Check out your competitors. Who is your competition marketing to? Who are they doing business with? What are they doing differently – and is it working? And are they marketing services in person? Online? At educational events?
3. Create personas. A marketing persona allows you to visualize and categorize different segments of your consumers. In our example at the beginning, Persona A might be a retired couple looking for retirement advice. And Persona B might be a middle-aged couple with high school-aged kids looking for college financial guidance. What other personas might your business need? And what further details could we add to the personas we have?
4. Find out who your audience isn’t. Maybe we can’t fully grasp who your audience is, but surely, we can save some marketing cash by avoiding wasteful spending. If your audience is retirement age, it’s clear that we can avoid younger generations or those that fall outside of our age brackets in marketing ads.
5. Never settle. The more you research, the clearer your picture will be. And remember, your audience is growing and changing too. So, there’s never a point when your target audience is set. There will always be room for improvement.
How LeadingResponse Can Help
Your small business marketing plan should include creating and analyzing your target audience. But it can be a full-time job and requires constant updates. At LeadingResponse, we have our Consumer Data Platform, which allows our experts to filter behavioral data, transactional data, and demographic and socioeconomic data to determine your ideal prospect. And we can use these points to predict the optimal next move based on our consumer feedback. We help our clients achieve better and more qualified engagements.
When you need assistance with reaching your target audience, LeadingResponse is second to none. Let us help you connect with more qualified consumers.
