Are You Neglecting Your Target Audiences’ Needs?
Understanding your target audiences’ needs is an extremely important asset necessary for businesses to be successful in their endeavors.
A target audience is a group of people who are most likely to utilize your product or service.
These consumers can range in age, gender, income, interests, marital status, etc.
For a business to be successful, understanding, and utilizing your target audience is key for effective ad campaigns, product development, and more!
I. How to Find Your Target Audience
There are many different ways to find who your target audience is. Client interviews, market research, and competitive analysis are key approaches
necessary for discovering who you should be targeting when developing marketing strategies and ad campaigns.
Client interviews should be 15 to 30-minute meetings where a company will ask open-ended questions making sure the clients are aware that there are no wrong answers.
Establishing trust with the interviewees is absolutely essential, as having completely honest answers is the key to a successful client interview.
These interviews will help your business develop marketing strategies to best suit your target audiences’ needs.
Don’t just ask questions about your product or service, instead, ask questions about the client.
To develop a successful marketing plan or ad campaign, it is necessary to understand exactly who your target audience is and what they need.
While client interviews are great for understanding who your target audience is, market research is perfect for understanding exactly what they want.
Market research isn’t just putting together a group of people and compiling their thoughts on your product (although that may be a helpful strategy for you).
You can start by looking into consumer markets and researching economic data.
The key to market research is not just whether or not people would buy your product or service but discovering to what extent people believe your product
or service is worth the purchase, whether they believe they should recommend it to a friend, whether or not the consumer would utilize it
frequently, or whether or not the product can become a necessity to them.
Market research is key to discovering how and when consumers would utilize
your product or service so that you know exactly how to market to your target audience.
A final strategy to understanding your target audience is competitive analysis.
This strategy is great at helping your business understand exactly what it needs to become as successful as it can be.
Competitive analysis is not to understand and copy what your competitors are doing but should be used as a way to better understand your target audience and what they are looking for.
Competitors should be studied as a way to understand the market – what are people looking for and why are they looking for it.
You can also use this analysis as a way to help your business identify its strengths and weaknesses, and to improve itself.
You can also use competitive analysis to help you create your own marketing strategies by seeing what works well with your target audience and what does not.
II. Listen, Listen, Listen
The most important tool for ensuring that your target audiences’ needs are met is by listening to them!
Ensuring that you understand what your target audience wants is an extremely important aspect of operating a successful business.
When asking your target audience questions, make sure you don’t focus on what they can do for your business.
Instead, focus on what your business can do for them.
Make sure you get all of the necessary demographic information (age, gender, income, marital status, education, employment, etc.) before asking questions that will allow your business to understand who your target audience is.
Ask about what they like to do for fun, what are their values or morals, what makes them happy, sad, or angry.
Questions like these will help you establish a relationship with the target audience and ensure that they feel comfortable enough to answer your questions openly and honestly.
Plus, the information will help you understand exactly what their needs are, and how you can meet them.
After you have collected the information from your clients, utilize this information effectively in developing marketing strategies and ad campaigns.
For example, if your business is selling re-useable water bottles created for hiking or other active endeavors, your target audience would not be people
with a sedentary lifestyle. Instead, your target audience would be young adults with an interest in an active lifestyle. In the client interviews, the
business might have discovered that these young adults don’t watch television.
Instead, they consume most of their media through app-based entertainment.
Thus, the business may want to focus their marketing strategies through social media.
By listening to their target audience, the business would understand what needs the consumers are looking to be met and the most effective way for the
business to market to them.
This way, the ad campaigns are being viewed by the right people, which is key for marketing directly to the consumer.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
III. Building Trust With Your Target Audience
To ensure that your target audiences’ needs are being met, make sure that you are building trust with your target audience.
By being an authentic and honest business, customers are more likely to continue using and re-using your product or service, as well as recommend you to their friends, family, co-workers, etc.
Building trust with your consumers also allows them to feel safe and be more honest about what exactly they are looking for.
Ways to build trust and your credibility with your target audience include providing consistent quality in your products or services, managing customer
service quickly and efficiently, engaging with your consumers through social media, e-mails, or ad campaigns, and being transparent with the story of the
company and the owners.
One of the easiest ways to build trust with your target audience and ensure that you are meeting their needs is by allowing consumers to leave reviews and respond to them.
A lot of people utilize reviews to decide where to eat lunch, where to shop for an item, what doctor to visit, or where to get their nails done.
Although a business should always strive to have no negative reviews, how you respond to those reviews is just as important.
Always make sure to acknowledge anything that was done wrong and give an honest apology.
Let the consumer know how you will use their negative experience to improve your business and invite them to see the outcomes.
Always thank them for their feedback, as it is a vital part of improving your business and ensuring that your target audiences’ needs are met.
IV. Keep Your Friends Close and Your Competition Closer
If there is anyone who understands your target audience as much as you do, it’s your competitors.
Utilize them to the best of your ability and research what effectively works for them and what doesn’t.
The key to utilizing your competitors is a simple question – what can you offer your consumers that your competitors have not?
Once you have determined who your target audience is and have begun to understand their needs, researching competitors can help you understand ways to meet those needs that other competitors did not utilize.
Going back to the example of the company whose target audience is young active adults, maybe those adults are taking dogs with them on their hikes.
Maybe adding a marketing strategy that would include dogs would allow your target audience to connect more with your brand.
Understanding who your target audience is, and what they are looking for is extremely important to ensure that your brand is meeting those needs.
Your business should always be looking for ways to improve and connect with your target audience, meeting them where they are at.
By ensuring that their needs are being met through your product or service, you are setting your business up for a lifetime of success.