Target Audience

As a functional business body, one of the most crucial things you will do is, learning your target audience. Your sales exec should have a comprehensive understanding of your target market, the issues faced by it, its interests and inclinations, etc. 

You need to know the psychology of your target market so that you can communicate with them effectively and serve them better.

This blog outlines a few tips to develop an understanding of your target audience. Learn them and facilitate your business growth. 

1. Don’t assume anything

While deciding your target audience, don’t lead with any assumptions. Go deeper and know who your target audience is and why it is so. You must draw insights into some of their typical behaviors and interests. Or else you would waste your efforts and resources on the wrong audience. 

2. Research as much as you can 

It’s always better to lead with thorough research. You can refer to different case studies and psychological analyses done by other marketers. Apart from that, contact general market researchers, industry reporters, and in few cases, sociologists. Refine your data to make sure that the research is pertinent and as recent as possible. 

3. Craft a customer persona

Now that you have conducted fine research and gathered enough objective data, you can go ahead with creating a customer persona. This persona is typically a fictional character who demonstrates all the characters an “average” member of your target audience is supposed to have. 

From hard factors like age, sex, education, organization, and income to disposition factors like sensitivity, curiosity, and temperament, consider all these factors while creating a customer persona.

4. Conduct large-scale quantitative surveys 

Along with some primary research, conduct large-scale quantitative surveys. It should cover the widest cross-section of your target audience. Your questions should be in an objective format so that you can acquire hard statistics about the traits and habits of your audience. 

Consider asking questions pertinent to your brand and product. 

5. Conduct small-scale qualitative surveys 

Accompany your quantitative research with qualitative research. However, aim to gain detailed insights and not objective data with your qualitative surveys. For that, focus on a small sample of your target audience members and include open-ended questions to receive long responses. Thereby understand their psychological makeup. 

For example, you can consider asking, “what does this idiom mean to you?’ or “what do you thought when you come across this image?”

6. Learn from your competitors 

Be open to learning from your competitors. If they focus on the same audience as you do and have already executed relevant market research, then observe them and learn how they write and advertise to their customers. 

7. Look to other established products and services 

Take a glance at other products and services used by your target audience. Get to know how those brands position themselves, their brand messaging, etc. 

8. Pay attention to social conversations

Use social listening software and targeted social lists to acknowledge what your target audience is saying online. Which trending topics are they following? Whom do they usually communicate and interact with? 

9. Evaluate interactions with your brand

Make use of social listening software again along with Google Analytics to evaluate user behavior on your site. Analyze how your target audience is communicating with your brand. Thereby, refine your approach towards them. 

10. Allow some space to grow 

It’s hardly possible to develop a perfect understanding of your target audience as your target audience is never going to be the same. They will eventually evolve and change. Thus, facilitate some breathing space in your strategy and understand your audience a little bit better. 

Concluding thoughts

None of these tips can offer you a perfect picture of the “average” customer in your target audience. People are way too diverse and incalculable for any assumptions to consider valid. 

Thus, gather information from multiple sources and consolidate it into one comprehensive vision. From that point, you can offer the best to your audience and retain them for all good reasons.