Defining Your Target Audience
In this article, we will be defining your target audience through a simple process of questions and answers:
Start with who you are
Ask yourself: what are the types of people and companies I achieved results with in the past? Do I currently have easy access to these people? If not, where did I used to meet them, and how can I easily network with them again?
Define your niche
Chances are, the answers on the above questions still leave you with a very large audience.
Ask yourself again while keeping the product or service you sell in mind:
- Can I identify a pain in the market that my product is ideally suited to solve? Or can I identify a passion (often irrational) that I could help the market fulfill with my product or service?
- Are people already actively looking to resolve their issue? If yes, where are they looking?
- How can you modify or add features to your product or service, either through retooling or through marketing that can uniquely address the pain or passion in the market?
Profile your target audience
So you’ve got the solution to the problem. Now it is time to figure out how to communicate said solution effectively to your chosen demographic:
Try to figure out a general profile for your target audience by asking the following questions:
- What are there desires?
- What do they need?
- What language do they use (this is important, because you’ll use that language to communicate to them)
- What values do they have (these are standards of what they deem acceptable, and a way of being in the world that matters to them. Your brand needs to reflect these values).
- What is their level of expertise (again, important, because you don’t want to bore them with things they already know, nor do you want to try to impress them with information they couldn’t possibly understand.)
