Communicating your message to the right audience for your business is vital. If you’re not engaging the people most interested in your product or service, you won’t have the customers you need and the business will inevitably begin to struggle. Of course, that’s the nightmare situation every business wants to avoid.

However, in many instances, determining your target audience is easier said than done. You might feel like you have a great product or service idea, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you know who your audience is and who you should be targeting. Here are some ways to help focus your efforts and target your marketing to the right audience.

Start with Your Product

It’s often a good idea to start with your product and determine your audience from there. You should analyze what you’re offering and really think about what the benefits of your offer are. What demographic stands to benefit the most from your product or service?

For instance, if your product offers the benefit of saving time around the house, it stands to reason you’ll be targeting busy homeowners. Typically that demographic is between 30-50 and likely has a child or children living at home. That’s just an example, but you can see the logic of how you take the product’s benefits and build an audience from there.

Consider Your Current Customer Base

Hopefully, you’ll have some sort of customer base in place already. If that’s the case, you can use them to understand more about what your target audience wants and who they are. You can conduct surveys and ask for feedback to find out more about the people who are already buying from you.

If you spot trends in the demographics of people who are already buying from you, you can translate that information into determining your target audience and where you should be focusing your marketing and advertising going forward. It’s relatively simple and it makes sense.

Think About Who Your Main Competitors Are Targeting

You can also find out who your audience is by looking at who your direct competitors are trying to target. If they’re targeting specific groups of people with the kinds of products that you’re also offering, chances are you should be taking a similar approach.

This strategy of determining your target audience is particularly useful for new businesses that are entering the market and trying to disrupt more established competitors. As you look to overtake them, it also pays off to learn from them and use the ideas that they’ve already established as being successful.

Engage with Your Customers Online

These days, you also need to take an online approach. It’s a good way to engage your audience directly and to really find out what they’re looking for. You should try to make sure that you have a presence on various social media platforms and start talking to your audience directly.

You can then find out more about who’s following your profiles, liking your posts and sharing your content with their friends and family. It tells you who’s most interested in what you’re saying. And the people who are most interested in what you’re saying are probably representative of the people you should be targeting.

Evaluate Your Target Audience Too

You should continually try to evaluate your target audience to the best of your ability. Doing this enables you to adapt with the times and make changes when necessary. Adding new products might shift or broaden your target audience and you need to be alert to those kinds of changes so you can adjust your target audience accordingly.

Things change over time and that’s certainly true in the world of business and marketing. If you stand still and stop trying to engage with your target audience and the demographics that comprise it, you’re only going to run into unnecessary problems sooner or later. It’s about staying on the ball and not letting things stagnate.

In the world of marketing, you can’t afford to underestimate the importance of determining and identifying your target audience. You should always be clear about who your business needs to focus on and then formulate ways to target them in the correct and proper way. And if you need additional help, feel free to contact us.