Identifying and understanding your target audience, emphasizing its importance for business growth and evolution.
Identifying and understanding your target audience, emphasizing its importance for business growth and evolution. It highlights how companies like Amazon started with a narrow focus and expanded their target audience over time.
Today we’re going to be talking about how to find your target audience. Finding your customers, retaining them, being there, making them loyal is everything. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you and walking you through it step by step. So without further ado, let’s get into it. You want to start by understanding: where is your target audience? You are starting with a big vision for your business. You have a big vision. You know how you’re going to be starting, just for an example, with a store and then building it into what’s going to become a mall. The same thing, for example, with Amazon—when Amazon started, they were selling books, but they knew that they wanted to be the everything store. Now you can buy anything that you want on Amazon. But, again, things have changed for Amazon, and that profile and audience have also changed over the course of time. Why is
the target audience so important? The target audience is everything. Really understanding who you’re going after and having data that validates who you’re going after is going to allow you to understand how you can make a meaningful business. According to the same research from CB Insights, over 42% of companies that failed did so because they brought a product to market where there was no need. That’s why, more than anything, you want to be familiar with what that problem is that your customers or your potential customers are experiencing. Again, if there’s no need for your product or your service, nobody is going to buy it. If you find your target audience and you listen to them, you’re going to be able to get to product/market fit. And if you want to know whether or not you have product/market fit, it’s very simple: ask your customers, “If you could no longer use our product or
service, would you be 1) very disappointed, 2) a little bit disappointed, or 3) you wouldn’t care? Marketing: marketing is another one. When you are able to nail it in the marketing, when you put $1 in and take $2 or $3 out. You know your customer acquisition cost, your lifetime value, all of these different metrics that make a big difference, that is going to give you even more data. It’s going to help you understand: where are your customers? Where does the audience ultimately live? Knowing your target audience is also going to allow you to differentiate yourself from competitors. How do you find your target audience? What are some of those tactics that you could use? You definitely should go online; you should research. There are probably great reports, great studies that have been published. Some of those studies and reports may cost you an arm and a leg, but there’s no need to
invest a lot of money on this. You can also use other tools like Kissmetrics, where you can see throughout the flow of onboarding, purchasing, and retaining them how the customer is behaving. You want to be able to use that because that’s going to help you in knowing whether that audience is the right one, or perhaps there’s a different audience that you should be going after. Your target audience is ultimately going to define the DNA of your business. Without a doubt, it is critical to direct your advertising, your marketing, the input, and the output that you’re able to get for all the hard work. So it’s all about working smart so that you can get better results. So get out there and get your own customers.