Just like any other aspect of a brand’s identity, research work on the target audience of a company is equally essential for its growth.
Knowing who you are selling to, helps a lot with not just the sales, but the development of your products as well. Hence, this blog where we discuss everything you need to know about target audience.
WHAT IS TARGET AUDIENCE?
Audience/ customers can simply be considered as people who buy your products or avail your services. Target audience however is a group of people that you base your sales and marketing strategy around.
Now, these people are generally interested in your products, but considering that they have the same preferences as you have is a big mistake.
Likes and dislikes are based completely upon perspective. What looks outstanding to you might look mediocre to someone else.
Hence, considering your target audience as a single person is the biggest mistake any business owner can make.
The key to the minds of your target audience is proper research. This study will provide you with the basic information about the needs of your audience and their purchase behavior in general. With research, you will be able to segregate your audience into different classes for better analysis and results.
SEGREGATING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
As we discussed above, a better way to understand your audience is by categorization. In general, any audience base can be categorized according to demographics and psychographics.
Demographics determine who your audience is, eg. Males, based in New York area and earning $150k per year, whereas, psychographics focus on audience behavior, eg. they are into sports and are adventurous.
Demographics and Psychographics allow you to manage your target audience more efficiently. The key factors in demographics include age, location, income, education, work, etc.
Whereas the key factors in psychographics are values, interests, hobbies, attitudes, etc. Hence, analyzing the target audience based on such factors allows for better planning and decision making regarding your products and services.
The ideal method of gathering information based on demographics and psychographics is by social media. Considering that a majority of the modern population is super active on social media.
And conducting small polls and votes over there can give you a general idea of what the audience wants from your brand. This method of studying the audience has been going on since ages and has provided excellent results almost a century ago. Hence, with the reach of social media today, polls should be a walk in the park.
HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?
If your business is not growing as expected, chances are that you are not even dealing with your target audience right now.
Maybe your current customers are there for a specific product which is hindering the overall success of your brand. Hence, finding your niche and more importantly your target audience is extremely essential. And just like we discussed above, audience analysis is essential for doing just that.
In fact, start with your current audience, group them in categories and analyze their purchase patterns, this will tell you more about their requirements and expectations from the brand.
Using competitor information is a great strategy for success. It not only gives you information on what the public wants, but it also informs you about the latest trends which you can incorporate into your products.
SURVEYS
Another great method of improvement for your brand is through surveys. These surveys can be conducted on social media (like we discussed earlier) or even directly from the customers visiting your store (in terms of feedback).
Surveys also act as a medium of promotion for your brand as people talk about the company in an indirect way.
Hence, tools just like survey can help you in identifying your potential audience along with allowing you to improve your products from the feedback.
POST SURVEYS
After you gather the data and improve your products using the surveys, approaching your target audience comes next.
Some questions regarding your audience usually come up after the research process. Answering these questions becomes extremely essential in order to bring your target audience to life.
These questions are: How does the target audience that the data identifies match up with your current customer base? If the two do not match up, how do you plan to target the new audience while retaining existing customers?
As soon as you answer these questions on your brands level, reaching the target audience will become easy. An effective way of managing how your audience responds is by building buyer personas.
These personas can be built from the stats obtained from the demographic and psychographic data. Some typical details which you can include in a buyer persona are:
- Age
- Location
- Occupation
- Lifestyle
- Relationship status
- Motivation
- Challenges
- Interests
Segregating your audience on the basis of these phases can make the overall “bringing target audience to life” process simpler and easier.
Finding out your target audience is not an easy task by any means. It involves finding your flaws and then implementing changes to them, which can be extremely hard.
In most cases, proper analyzation after implementing the changes is equally important as it informs you about the impact these new changes have had on the brand.
Finding your target audience is all about making positive changes. Changes which will assist with the growth of your brand. Hence, stepping out of your comfort zone is essential for taking these necessary steps and implementing new changes.
Brand identity elements could also be hindering your company’s success. In cases where the identity elements are not able to represent a brand flawlessly, the success rate starts decreasing.
And if that is the case, your brand identity elements won’t attract the target audience as you would like them to. Hence, if that is the case, you should consider stepping up your brand identity game. You could either make the necessary changes yourself or hire a professional for the job.
Talking about design professionals, crowdsourcing is the most hyped phenomenon in the design world right now. Logo design contests should be your go to, if you want to save time and money while designing an outstanding logo for your brand.
Designfier can assist you with organizing these logo design contests at an astonishing price for the services they provide. For a revolutionary price of just $99, you can ideally design a bright future for your brand. The company caters with designing needs for all brand identity elements. Hence, you can never go wrong with choosing Designfier. Let the professionals do the heavy lifting for you.
