Salespeople and business owners must be aware of their intended customer base. To find the perfect person for your offering, ask yourself, “Who would be the best match?” What are their interests and priorities?”
These queries can be responded to so as to give priority to the contracts that have the highest chances of success. But how can you gain a thorough understanding of your target audience?
We should scrutinize more closely what a target market is, analyze the target market, look at exemplary illustrations, differentiate target market groupings, and examine how sales personnel can make the most of target markets.
How to Analyze Your Target Market
market. These are the five steps you can take to accomplish one of your goals.
1. Analyze your product or service.
Examine the product you are offering to determine which individuals would gain advantages from it. The questions below will help with the brainstorming process:
- “What need does your product or service fill?”
- “Are there any problems or pain points it solves for?”
- “Who would benefit most from your product or service?”
After answering these queries, you may want to consider collecting feedback from current patrons. Hold a group discussion or inquire the service personnel about their recurring difficulties.
Examining your offering in this fashion will enable you to have a better comprehension of your target audience. It’s possible that you will discover your current patrons are not the demographic you are attempting to reach. If you can tell that something isn’t right in this procedure, you need to make certain that the group you’d like to attract is consistent with the objectives of the marketing campaign in order to bring everything back into balance.
2. Check out the competition.
Conduct an examination of your rivals to determine which demographic they are aiming for. Examine the customers they have, and discover whether there is a place in the industry you could center on that they could be ignoring.
The most efficacious route to take is to perform a comparison evaluation. This requires exploring who your rivals are, the services they provide, and analyzing their sales strategies.
Examining what your competitors are doing can assist you in uncovering target audience segments that you can focus on. Do they have any target markets that they are not targeting?
This could result in you broadening your reach to other areas or creating fresh items to appeal to a distinct customer base.
3. Choose criteria to segment by.
A specific group of potential customers can be divided up according to various factors. Consumers can be divided according to demographic, geographic, and behavioral traits.
This is basically the act of crafting an ideal customer profile. Breaking your market into distinct groups of buyers, referred to as buyer personas, should be your goal.
For instance, maybe your target audience consists of medium-sized businesses aiming to buy marketing automation applications. It may be useful to categorize your target customers into different sections, such as marketing directors, sales administrators, founders, or chief executive officers.
Here are some of the most common ways to segment a target market:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- Behavior
- Lifestyle
- Values
- Interests
4. Perform research.
Once you have started to target a specific audience, the investigation does not stop there. How can you best appeal to your intended audience? Will your product or service reach a sizeable audience? Conducting market research will give you an insight into the group of people you are attempting to sell to.
Selecting the appropriate target audience can give you a tremendous amount of insight into your organization. Are you aiming to become an organization that produces results quickly, or do you envision yourself as one that maintains a constant influx of corporate and non-corporate clients?
5. Track and evaluate your results.
Analysis of your target market should never be a one-time affair – satisfaction with the results shouldn’t bring about complacency nor signify an end to the research. It’s an ongoing process. It is essential to keep an eye on how things are going, analyse what you observe and make adjustments to your desired audience in order to be successful in speaking to them.
Challenges and pain points as the foundation of target audience analysis
Realizing the issues that are causing distress to people who are the intended part of your outreach can either make or ruin your marketing campaigns.
This enables you to create material with the main objective of addressing an actual issue or query that is troubling real buyers.
If you can accomplish that, you will have established a successful content marketing plan.
Let’s put our workout sneakers on and analyze what it means with an illustration from the fitness world.
Imagine that you are advertising a home exercise system designed to help with weight reduction. People that are interested in it have some obvious pain points such as:
- weight problems
- health issues
- no access to fitness equipment
- restricted access to the gym due to the pandemic or location
All the mentioned points are worthy of your attention.
But that is not enough. We need to go deeper.
Take into consideration someone who has difficulty with their weight–they may encounter a broad selection of obstacles in their day-to-day existence. Some of them could be:
- confidence and motivational issues
- poor organizational skills
- poor eating habits
- knowledge gaps
All of these issues must be tackled if one is intending on formulating a content plan.
As is evident, we do not wish to address solely issues directly connected to the fitness plan. By doing this, you can cover a larger area and get the audience enthused about matters that can stir up a great emotional reaction.
Target Market Analysis Example
Let’s think about a business that supplies reasonably priced sports shoes that concentrates more on comfort and support rather than on the fashionable look.
1. Analyze the product or service.
When doing its target market analysis, the business must begin by examining its product carefully and objectively to better understand the value and points of distinction it holds.
It appears probable that the company’s shoes would be more suitable for everyday use rather than for rigorous fitness activities, lack an attractive style, and can assist in mitigating discomfort from standing for extended periods.
The initial understanding gained can be used to form the types of people that the firm will eventually go after. It would be able to better understand how to assemble its advantages. Within this context, the most probable purchasers of the shoes seem to be older men in suburban areas who do not dedicate much time to physical activity.
2. Check out the competition.
The organization would then investigate their rival’s merchandise, how they were marketing them, and any open spaces in the pools of customers they were aiming to reach. The company could glean useful insights from a comparative analysis that could reveal particular geographical trends within its desired customer base that its competitors have overlooked.
Let’s only consider metropolitan areas and not count spots like outer-city malls and small family-owned shops. Considering this data, the business could have the initial step for creating its products and services to meet the demands of customers that their rivals are neglecting.
3. Choose criteria to segment by.
Here, the company would start to build up more comprehensive personas. Once again, the company would segment their criteria based on their research of the product, and modify it according to their study of their competitors.
In this situation, a considerable proportion of the criteria would be based on age, socioeconomic group, area, and hobbies – with one of its characters being older, belonging to a lower-income group, living in the suburbs, and focusing on practicality over looks.
4. Perform research.
The company would develop its ideal customer profile, then analyze the market, survey people that fit it, perhaps organizing focus groups, and use any other methods it sees necessary for full comprehension of its potential customers.
From that point, it can build a judicious, persuasive offer that will control its marketing communication, contact methods, cost system, and other essential sales-related elements that influence its means of connecting with purchasers.
5. Track and evaluate results.
After dealing with the earlier stages, the corporation would remain attentive to how their techniques are received by their representative customer. If sales are not at the desired level, or it seems that there could be other customer types the business could appeal to, then it is a good idea to reconsider the messaging, goals, and target audience, potentially making adjustments as necessary.
Classifying target audience by roles in the buying process
A Decision Making Unit is a collective phrase referring to the ensemble of people involved in selecting which products or services to purchase in a business-to-business context. There are six roles in the DMU you need to be aware of (it is important to note that one person can cover multiple roles):
- users
- initiators
- influencers
- buyers
- gatekeepers
- decision-makers
The main purpose for separating the roles is so that you can provide them with different content to suit their needs. The classification could be deceiving – you should supply them with material that is appropriate to the stage in the marketing funnel they are currently occupying.
Considering the content marketing perspective, we should be concentrating on three different roles. It is hard to be exact as the roles and phases can overlap, but it often ends up like this:
- Users: Awareness, Interest [TOFU]
- Influencers: Interest, Consideration, Intent [MOFU]
- Decision-makers: Intent, Evaluation, Purchase [BOFU]
Users
Individuals who employ your product or service are the customers. Why are they important? The answer is simple. They have difficulties and you are here to aid them.
The benefit is also apparent since users typically take on the part of introducing the subject.
Let’s introduce an example to simplify things.
As a facility manager, your daily duties include inspecting the facility, making necessary repairs, and completing any necessary maintenance to make sure the building is functioning properly.
You realize that it would be beneficial to employ an automated maintenance management system.
What do you do? As someone who will use the tool, contact your supervisor to ask if they are able to get some software that can assist with the issue you are dealing with. This makes you both the person using the tool, as well as the person who began the inquiry.
Influencers
Someone whose opinion carries weight to someone who makes decisions is known as an Influencer. It can be either an internal or external person connected to your business.
If you work in marketing and your wares or services receive a nod from someone like Neil Patel, it could cause a huge upsurge in your sales. An illustration of this concept is the following post: 10 Digital Marketing Resources For Boosting Expansion of a Start-Up Company.
Considering the quantity of shares and remarks, we can safely say that the article was widely seen. Considering Neil’s influence, corporations would be willing to pay a considerable sum in order to gain admittance to this compilation.
You don’t need to have your product promoted by Oprah or Dr. Oz to benefit from the power of influence. Lots of people struggle when it comes to choosing, and being guided by another person’s advice can make them feel safer.
Major companies are aware of this, and they use influencer marketing to communicate with their target group. If you lack the money to get renowned influencers, you can always contact micro-influencers from your market and interact with your fans in an even more true way.
Although it may be challenging to assess how much influencers influence your sales, there are numerous examples of why including influencers in your content marketing approach is beneficial.
Decision-makers
Those in charge of making choices are ultimately the ones who decide what product/service will be purchased.
They are making the purchase in light of the feedback they obtained from users, influencers, and other individuals involved in the acquisition process. Usually, they will have special worries that you should take into consideration.
Research and analysis are done, what now?
In ideal conditions, by the end of this process you should have the following info:
- relevant demographic and psychographic data
- list of all relevant challenges, pain points, and objections to the sale
- a few well-crafted target audience personas
What should you do next?
What was the motive behind the research you conducted? You did have a goal in mind, right?
Typically, comprehensive examination of this nature is an element of constructing a content marketing plan. However, having this data on hand can also be used to:
- create standalone content strategies and editorial calendars (after you also perform keyword research)
- improve your link building campaigns
- improve your PPC efforts
- build a bigger social media following and improve engagement
- improve your conversion rates
With the correct data about your desired audience, there is no limit to what you can accomplish.
