Identifying the Who, What, When, Where and Why of Your Target Market

Being in the marketing industry, one of our primary focuses is our consumers. They should probably be your main focus too. No matter your industry, it’s important to understand your target audience to advertise your business or brand successfully. When you know your audience and understand their wants and needs, you can better “motivate them to take action.”

In our recent Friday at Four activity, we played a little game that tests your audience knowledge, or in this case, your judge knowledge. We crafted our own “X’s to X’s” game that follows the same structure as the game “Apples to Apples” (or if you’re familiar with “Cards Against Humanity”). The object of the game is for all the players to place down a card with a noun written on it that they think best matches a given adjective.

It works like this:

1. The judge pulls an adjective card. Let’s say it’s delicious.
2. All players, except the judge, put down a card from their choice of seven noun cards.
3. The judge reads out the submitted options: “Commercials,” “Walk-On’s,” “AAF Luncheons,” “Hunter Territo” or “Donuts.”
4. Then the judge decides which card they feel best describes the word delicious.
5. Whoever’s card gets chosen receives a point.

The key to the game is to know who your target audience is so that the card you play gets selected. You have to understand the judge’s interests, their personality and definitely their sense of humor. The more you know your audience, the stronger your chance of winning is.

With this idea in mind, we wanted to share a few tips on how you as a marketer can get to know your audience and how to target to them.

1. Identify your audience.

Before you can start to understand and connect with your audience, you first need to figure out who exactly your audience is.

Ask these questions: Who does your business or product cater to? Who is already looking at your competition? Who do you want your audience to be?

• It helps to start by breaking your overall audience into groups. This is called segmentation, and it makes pinpointing your target viewers/buyers a little easier.
• Try to be specific and organize groups based on commonalities (age, gender, location, etc.).

2. Appeal to your audience.

Once you establish who you want to target, conduct a little research and decide the best way to market to them.

Ask these questions: What do they want or need? What do they care about? What do they dislike?

• Do a little digging on social media to learn about your viewers’ interests.
• Set up analytics to see where viewers are coming from and their viewing patterns.

3. Make a plan.

After you have answered those questions about your audience's interest, determine a marketing strategy based on your research.

• Develop relatable content.
• Start conversations and get engaged digitally.
• Tailor your message to their interests.

Once you are truly able to understand who your audience is and what their interests are, you’ll be able to set up more effective marketing plans to better fuel your business. Forget what you think you know about your audience and use these tips to really get to know them. And when you need a break from researching, stop by our office to learn more about us in a friendly game of “X’s to X’s.”

Sources: MediaOcean, SocialMediaToday, Forbes, Entrepreneur