Target audience is a topic of many forum and blog posts. We read a lot about how important it is to define and know who your target audience is, and how to reach them. Today I have a couple of creative ideas you can use to help you narrow down and define your target audience.
We all would love for our target audience to be huge, like women age 18 - 75 who likes handcrafted items, but narrowing it down will make it easier to find and communicate to our intended audience. If we don't we are wasting time, money, and effort. Trying to be all thing to everyone results in not being anything to anyone.
Give this a try, answer these questions in your journal:
Where do your customers shop?
What groups or associations do they belong to?
What media do they consume? List magazines, books, blogs, TV shows
How are they using the Internet? Surfing, shopping, reading blogs, selling, sharing photos
What competitor products do they use? Think big box shopping as well as handcrafted
What are the demographics of your target audience? remember to narrow this down to your most likely customer - include age, sex, level of education, job, marital status, family situation
What trends affect your business?
Doing this will help you gain focus. It will give you a list of where your customer is shopping, what they like, people they spend time with, making it easier to target your marketing materials.
Are you a visual person? Try this:Get a bunch of magazines and catalogs you like, and rip out pictures of who is likely to own your merchandise. Rip out several options, your customer in a casual look, dressed up, on location, the more you find the easier it will be to define your customer.
Once you have ripped out several photo's look to see what they all have in common. Start a list.
What is their age?
What is their style?
Where would they shop, watch on TV, read?
Answer the questions above as well.
Add the pictures you find to your list, so you have visuals of your customer along with the info you write down to get to know your customer better.
Give one or both of these options a try. You might be surprised what you learn, and the more you learn the better you are going to be at reaching your target audience.
Once you have put your list together post it so it is handy, and when you are online, keep in mind the customer you are trying to reach and market your efforts towards them. The results should be more people interested in what you are creating.
Have any other ideas on defining your target market, share them in the comments section.
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