15 QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Before you can be successful with any business endeavour, you need to do a complete target market analysis to determine your ideal customer.
Creating a target market profile is often the most overlooked and difficult aspect of online marketing. But if you don’t take this step then your response rates will be low and you will likely waste a significant amount of money.
To help you determine your target market profile, we have compiled a list of 15 key questions to ask yourself to help with the process.
1. What Is Your Target Demographic?
These are characteristics of your target market profile that consider areas such as age group, gender, and marital status.
2. Where Do They Live?
Determining where your target audience lives will help you with location-based marketing campaigns as well as where to target traditional marketing methods.
3. What Industry Do They Work In?
The industry your target market works in may be more relevant to some business models than others. A simple example of target market industry would be targeting human resources if your company is selling an employee evaluation tool.
4. How Much Do They Earn?
This question will help you determine the price range of your product down the line. If your target market analysis shows that your ideal customer is in the low- to mid-range salary, you need to ensure that your prices reflect that and not that of a high-range salary.
5. What Are Their Hobbies?
Your answers should include both their hobbies and how they spend their free time such as playing baseball, running marathons or spending time at home with their families.
6. How Do They Get Their Information?
This used to be an easier target market question to answer. But with the introduction of the internet, it has made it more difficult. A target market example for this would be online (social media, online articles, Google etc.), traditional (newspapers, magazines, word of mouth) and advertising methods (billboards, transit advertising, and media advertising).
7. How Do They Communicate?
Again with the introduction of technology, these methods have changed. It can vary from face-to-face conversations and email to telephone calls. Determining this factor can help with your customer service department in knowing what the appropriate method to contact the customer would be and how quickly they are likely to respond.
8. How Do They Think?
This is a target market question that isn’t always evaluated as much as it should be. When answering this question consider personality type, attitude, values, lifestyle, and behaviour.
9. Who Is Important To Them?
Since referrals and peer support are crucial factors in business growth, it’s important to know who your target market is close to. From learning that information, you are now able to strategize ways to reach them as well.
10. How Can You Best Reach Your Target Market?
This factors into how your target market profile likes to communicate. Once you determine that, you can take those findings and tailor them to your proposed marketing strategy.
11. What Challenges Do They Face?
By understanding the challenges and frustrations that your target market has, it will help shift the conversation from how they can help you to how your business can help them.
12. Can Your Service Or Product Help Them With These Challenges?
First off, the answer should be yes or you need to reconsider your target audience. If you take the time to answer this question effectively, it can help shape upcoming marketing strategies.
13. What Pushes Them To Make Purchasing Decisions?
To better answer this question, you may also need to consider what influences them to make the final step, and what obstacles might be in their way.
14. Who Had These Customers Before You?
By determining who had these customers before you, your company can learn from their mistakes in order to retain these customers for the long run.
15. What Are Their Biggest Objections To Using Your Service Or Product?
This may be the most crucial question you need to answer. Without answering this question, you will never get the conversions for your business that you want and expect.
Once you have defined your target audience, your company will be able to create highly-marketed marketing campaigns. These will help increase brand awareness and encourage brand loyalty.
Source: edkentmedia.com.
