Finding out Who your Customers are
Identifying a Target Audience for your Product or Service
Small businesses and start-ups often try to target everyone. However, they can get better results by only targeting those most likely to purchase. Here's how to do it.
If you were asked who the main customers for your product were, would you answer with the words; “anyone who…”? If so, you may benefit from defining your customer base, or target audience, more closely.
Knowing precisely who to target means advertising messages can be geared towards them and adverts can be placed where they are most likely to be seen. If you go for a wide audience you might be lucky and get some customers, but generally your marketing may not be sufficiently strong to appeal to enough people.
Defining your audience starts off with a simple question; do you have existing customers or not?
Existing Customers
Analyse your database and find out who has bought from you in the past. What you’re looking for here are trends. There are different things to consider depending on whether you sell to businesses or consumers.
For example, if you sell to businesses you might look at their size in terms of number of employees or turnover, or perhaps they are in a particular market. For individuals it could be where they live, or age or gender.
If you look at it this way you’ll start to see patterns. These patterns represent a picture of a typical member of your target audience.
The next question to ask is whether this picture, this typical member, is actually who you want or not. If it is, then great. Focus your marketing activities on trying to attract more of them. If it’s not, what you’ve been doing so far is attracting the wrong kind of customer for you.
Of course, doing this requires an up-to-date database. If you’re not sure about how to do this then read Databases for Small Businesses.
Start-ups
It’s more difficult for new companies to identify a target audience because they have no track record. The new business owner is likely to ask their friends if they would be interested but as the answer is usually “yes” it’s not really very useful research.
Ultimately you’ll have to try to sell the product or service and see who responds, but try the following tips initially;
- Are you setting up in a business or trade you know well and can see a gap to fill? If so, this should be your audience.
- Who are competitors trying to attract by their advertising? Do you want the same type of people or can you see a gap they’re not filling? This gap can either be in the audience they serve or the needs they’re trying to meet. Maybe they’re using an approach that tries to appeal to everyone, in which case you may have an opening in targeting a specific audience with a particular message.
If this doesn’t generate any ideas then try a small launch, e.g. an advert in the local newspaper or a direct mailing and build it up from there.
The UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing and Institute of Direct Marketing both have excellent guides on finding and targeting customers. You may also need to research customers to find out more about them, so read How to Conduct Market Research for useful tips on how to do this.
