Do You Know Your Customers and How to Find them?
Who is your target audience?
Whether your business provides services or sells products, you need to know WHO your customers or target audience is. You may spend thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing campaigns to attract customers, but guess what, you may be reaching out to the wrong cluster of the potential customers, and therefore not getting the needed number of leads and actual sales.
What is Target Audience or Target Market? Why do you Need it?
A customer is anyone who is interested in or buys your product or service. When we refer Target Audience or Target Market, we usually mean a customer group, distinguishable by certain characteristics, that an organization targets in marketing efforts. That group may be based on demographic criteria (e.g. Age, gender), or it could also be based on certain behaviors or psychographic segmentation (e.g. lifestyle, values, occasion). In general target market is your typical customers or customer group. There is a need to identify target market so a business knows where to focus its marketing efforts and how to attract the customers that buy the most of the products or services. Your business would rather spend the advertising budget to attract customers where they gather in the highest concentration rather than advertise to everyone and hope some of them will convert to buyers.
How to Identify Target Audience / Market?
One of the methods is to use the existing customer base. Assuming that your business tracks all the sales and transactions and records information about each customer, it is very easy to identify those who purchase the most. All you need to do is to extract the demographics or other characteristics of your customers.
If you are not collecting and recording information about your customers, it is time to start doing this. If you do not know who is buying your products or services, you cannot develop good marketing plans, know your customers and reward them, or develop systems that will enable to locate your target audience in the highest concentration.
The following are some possible customer characteristics your business might consider recording. How may clusters you choose it strictly depends on the type of business you are in.
- Age
- Gender
- Income level / Earnings
- Geographical area
- Contact information (phone, email, address)
- Occupation
- Education
- Nationality and race (especially if you work globally)
- Ethnic and religious backgrounds
- First time / Repeat customer
You may add as many categories as you find necessary. Note, you will need either to collect this information directly from a client in a form or questionnaire (verbal or written) and /or your employee will need to categorize the customers based on observations (e.g. gender, approx. age, etc).
Market Research
Another way to identify your customer groups is through some research.
Survey your existing customers. When a customer visits your business, a customer representative will collect and record information about the customer. It can be inappropriate to ask about income or nationality, etc, but a rep can enter basic information onto the customer database. It is easy enough to notate customer account with information like gender, age (approximate OK).
If you need to know specifics or the highest concentration of your business customer base, you may do a more specific market survey.
Analyze your competitors. If your business is new and you do not have customer base, look at your competitors. Examine their customers and where they are.
Market Survey
The goal is to identify the customer groups that are most interested in your product. The more targeted approach you take the better defined target groups your business will have.
Identify:
- Needs; group customers based on their needs (e.g. families with small children or infants need diapers)
- Demographics (e.g. age & location of parent with infants)
- Psychology & Behaviors (e.g. interests, lifestyle, habits, how soon need to buy, frequency of product/service use, etc)
Choose the Media or how to conduct the research:
- Web based surveys or questionnaires
- Direct mail
- Personal interviews
- Focus groups
Depending on the needs and budget, your organization may do the research or hire a market research company to do the work.
Do you want to know what makes great customer service? Read this article “How To Boost Your Customer Service”