Do you have a new product or service and are unsure of the process involved in identifying your target market? Asking yourself the right questions can help you narrow down who your audience is. So when you’re thinking about what questions you should ask when identifying your target market, here are five questions to get you started.
1. Who Exactly Will You Be Selling To?
The fundamental ways to look at this are your potential customers’ gender, age, occupation, income, level of education, marital status, and ethnic background. But how do you find this information out?
First, look at your current customers and their demographics. If, for example, you are a computer games retailer, your largest demographic is likely to be boys and men under the age of 30. This is a good place to start; however, just because this is your traditional base, it does not mean that you should solely target these customers. If you wish to expand your business, you might think about targeting people you would not normally consider your customers. Your computer games company might seek to branch out and begin advertising to women who, until recently, were not thought of as gaming fans.
Knowing your demographic is crucial, as the answers to these questions will help you to understand the following ones.
2. How Does Your Target Demographic Behave?
Think about their purchasing habits. Does your target demographic tend to purchase products based on carefully reviewing the information presented to them and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of making a purchase? Or do they just go ahead and splurge on something, without giving it too much thought?
If your potential customers look more like the first group, you might plan a campaign that involves presenting them with the cold hard facts. If they look more like the second, a campaign that presents the product in a fun way might be a better option.
3. What Is Your Target Demographic Interested In?
One of the most valuable insights you can gain is in finding what fuels your target demographic’s interests. It’s no good creating a campaign advertising a new range of baseball-themed products if your customers don’t care about baseball.
4. How Does Your Target Demographic Buy Things?
How are your potential customers making their purchases? More and more people are doing most of their shopping online. Is your target market shopping online? If promoting a product for online sale, you’ll make good use of a direct link and a call to action. If you want customers to visit your store, your ad campaign will need to give people a reason to pay your business a visit.
5. How Can You Best Communicate With Them?
There are so many different ways of communicating with your customers now, that it can be overwhelming when thinking about how to target customers. Traditional channels like print might still be the most effective way at addressing older sections of your demographic, but do you know how younger people receive the majority of their information? Facebook and Instagram might work for some, but others might mainly use TikTok. Finding out these details will be a crucial key when planning out your campaigns.
How Can I Test Which Methods Are Most Effective in Targeting My Customers?
While the five questions above offer some insight into how and where to target your customers, the only real way of knowing if your ads will lead to sales is through testing. This will involve some A/B testing, which is where each of your ideas is tested for a period of time. It should soon become apparent what the better ideas are. From here, you can fine-tune what you’re doing. For example, you might first test social media networks and find that Instagram is not a good platform for your campaigns, and that it is much more effective for you to target your customers on Facebook.
Further A/B testing will allow you to compare two strategies to see which one is the most effective. You might have one ad that has a small image with lots of text, and another with a big image and not much text. It is only by doing A/B testing that you can find which of these will give you more bangs for bucks.
Once you have gone through this system, you will have an ad that you can run for a while. When it starts becoming less effective, you can start testing again to see what your next ad should be.
What Are the New Trends in Marketing for 2022?
One of the primary trends to expect in 2022 is the continued growth of social media networks that are not Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. TikTok is becoming increasingly popular across the world, particularly with younger demographics. A full 62 percent of Tik Tok users in the United States are aged between 10 and 29.
Influencer marketing—which involves brands using the clout of online influencers to market their products—will continue to see a rise in its use. It’s not difficult to see why, when influencers gain brands a full $5.78 return on investment for every $1 that they spend.
How to Excel At Digital Marketing
You can read articles all day and gain a decent understanding of what questions you should ask when identifying your target market, and perhaps do it reasonably well, but if you really want to excel, then it is worth speaking with the professionals. Digital Marketing Group is an expert in all aspects of digital marketing and can help you target your customers now and give you deep insights into where digital marketing will be going in the future so you will always be two steps ahead of the competition.
