When it comes to building a digital marketing plan, one crucial step stands out: identifying your ideal customer and strategizing the best way to reach them. To do this, it's essential to consider what they want, what challenges they face, and how you can provide solutions for their needs and wants. This is the process of defining your target audience.
What is a Target Audience?
Your target audience is the group of people you most want to reach with your content. This is most beneficial to your strategy because it helps you understand them, understand what they want, strategically reach them, and helps you build a relationship with them.
How to Define Your Small Business Target Audience
To define your small business's target audience, you need to identify the parts that make up your ideal customer. Here are a few key elements to consider:
Demographics: Demographics include age, gender, socioeconomic status, income level, education level, marital status, and profession. These details help you segment your audience into specific groups based on criteria relevant to your business.
Interests: Understanding your audience's interests allows you to understand better who they are and what they're interested in. This knowledge can guide your content creation and marketing efforts.
Purchase intentions: Working toward clear understanding of your target audience helps you understand what your customers want and where they are in the buying process.
A Step Further: Building a Buyer Persona
Now, let's talk about buyer personas. A buyer persona, or customer persona, represents your intended audience. It's a detailed profile that includes the traits and characteristics you identified when defining your target audience. Picturing this persona as you plan and create can help inform your content decisions and drive your efforts forward. By creating buyer personas, you can create content specific to different segments of your target customers.
Examples of Small Business Buyer Persona:
Audience Member - Restaurant Rita
Demographics:
Age: 34-49
Income: $175,000 / year
Education: Culinary Degree, Undergraduate degree in Business Administration
Marital Status: Single
Profession: Chef / Business Owner
Social Channels: Instagram, TikTok
Interests:
Hiking, Spas, Yoga, Food/Restaurant Industry News, Cooking Channel
Purchase Intentions:
Rita is looking for innovative equipment to help her restaurant business grow. She's in the consideration stage of the buying process. She is ready to talk to business owners who offer affordable restaurant equipment.
Target Audience Member - Retail Rick
Demographics:
Age: 55+
Income: $199,000 / year
Education: Business Management Degree
Marital Status: Married
Profession: Owns a chain of retail stores
Social Channels: Facebook
Interests:
Golf, Cycling, Historical non-fiction
Purchase Intentions:
Rick is looking for ways to increase sales for a particular product line in his running/cycling stores. He wants to target a broad audience of household decision-makers across different age ranges. He is open to exploring adjustments in his advertising efforts, including paid advertising on social networks and expanding his content on social media platforms.
Target Audience: Pull it All Together
Before creating content, think about what your target audience wants. Are they potential customers or current customers? A mix of both? Understand the type of content they're looking for, where they usually find information, and which social media platforms they prefer and use most frequently. Add this information to your persona.
Bottom Line: knowing your audience is half the battle for successful marketing. By understanding your audience's demographics and interests, you can effectively reach and engage with them.