How to Define Your Target Audience and Target Market

Good Marketing can get you 80% of the success. Building a great product or service is not enough in today’s world, but to know how exactly to present it to your customer is what gets you success.

Target Audience

Hey…don’t ever say “everybody is” your target audience, because it a bad plan to impress everyone on this earth. Target Audience is the most important thing you should start with. In fact this is the point you should keep in mind right before even building your product. Because once you have identified your target audience you will be in a position to know what all feature can be added in the service or the product that you are developing.  As much as we’d like to think so, not everyone is going to be equally interested in your product or service. So, who is most likely to be interested in what you have to offer? Example: Mom & Me a retail store by Mahindra focuses on not all ladies but its target audience is pregnant ladies. All their marketing efforts are to get attention from these people.

How to identify your Target Audience

Based on the following criteria you can identify which kind of people will like your product or service that your are building. Draw a perfect picture of your Target Audience

• Age

• Gender

• Occupation

• Household Income

• Marital Status

• Presence of children in the household

• Home Value

• Geographic Region(s)

Target Market

Target Marketing allows the marketer / sales team to customize their message to the targeted group of consumers in a more focused manner. Now Target Market is not the same as Target audience. To take the same example of Mom & Me here their Target audience is pregnant ladies but not all the pregnant ladies in the world will be interested in it. Target Market is detemined by some other factors like who can afford your product, what determines their decision to buy it, etc.

How to identify your Target Market

The target market can have variables like product, place(distribution), promotion and price with which you create a marketing mix strategy that determine the success of a product in that particular marketplace.

To market to any given audience effectively, it’s important to know your target market i.e., what are their habits, behaviors, likes, and dislikes. Markets can differ in size, geographic scale, locality, types of communities, and in the different types of goods sold. Because of the many variations included in a market it is essential to know that you cannot accommodate everyone’s preferences, so its very essential to pin point your market and focus on them.Target markets are groups of individuals separated by noticeable aspects you can identify them based on

• Geographic segmentation – Addresses (their location climate region), of course if you are selling woolen clothes, you don’t want GOA to be your target market 🙂
• Demographic/socio-economic segmentation – Gender, Age, Income, Occupation, Education, Household size, and Stage in the family life cycle. This will be little difficult to zero down the exact target, but effort is worth while.
• Psycho-graphic segmentation – Similar Attitudes, Values, and Lifestyles. Role of money does it buy material things, self-esteem, etc? Ethics/”moral compass”, Risk-taker vs. conservative Spendthrift vs. hoarder of money, You have to find out which economic class does your product cater to and then plan your strategy and marketing message accordingly.
• Behavioral segmentation  – Occasions say festival, marriage, public holidays, etc. What is the purchase timing and purchase amount of your target audience when, why, how, and where they do or do not buy a product.
• Product-related segmentation – Relationship to a product

It may be a difficult task to narrow down your target market and the audience but it will bring success to small entrepreneurs who are competing with the big and established companies, to reach to their small customers quite quickly than the big companies. Small businesses and Startups can rock by focusing on smaller groups and then growing big. More articles will be followed by more marketing terminologies, stay tuned!

Suggested for you Guerrilla Marketing Techniques 

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