Defining your target audience is a step that should be taken early on when starting a business. In order to create any kind of marketing materials you must know who you’re planning to sell to and what would appeal to them. Only after coming up with these crucial things can you take steps to reach these people.

Defining a target audience is more than guessing who might be interested in your services. It’s about defining a specific person or group of people, getting detailed and specific so that you know their wants and needs and how your company fits in with those desires.

Define

Start the process by defining your “ideal customer.” In order to define your target audience you must carefully consider many different things, getting as specific as possible in order to best define who you want to reach. Sometimes the person you want to reach isn’t the person you are reaching, so think about who you want to target.

• What age is your ideal customer?
• Where do they live?
• What does this person like to do?
• What kinds of things appeal to them?

The more specific you can be with your “ideal customer” the better you can target them. Many businesses say that they want to appeal to everyone so that they don’t alienate anyone. However, when you have a poorly defined target audience (or try to appeal to everyone) you aren’t able to really appeal to anyone. As a small business you need to find your niche and own it. Only huge places like Target and can get away with appealing to the masses and do it well. Small businesses must find a target and market to them in order to really reach people.

Discover

Once you’ve defined who your target audience is, you have to use this information to think about how to appeal to them. Different marketing tactics work better for different age ranges, sexes, geographic regions, and social classes. This is why it helps to be specific. If you’re targeting young male teens in California who like to surf, you’ll use different methods than if you’re targeting 40 year old men in New York who own businesses.

Think about colors, typography, textures, and styles that may appeal to your target audience. Subtle changes to your style can change who you appeal to, so don’t think that you need to be really blatant in order to reach your target audience. Sometimes the addition of a faint curve or soft look can make your website look more feminine. So it’s best to think about your target audience and your company’s character to decide what will work best for you.

Revisit

Even after your company has been in existence for a while, it’s a good idea to revisit who your target audience is, and see if it still fits in with who you want to reach. Your services and products may shift focus over time, and thus your audience will shift too. Or, you may decide you want to sell a higher-end product, so your marketing tactics will need to change in order to reach a different type of person. Make sure you always know who you’re aiming to reach and how to best appeal to them. This is the best way to reach the most amount of people.

As you can see there’s a lot that goes into defining your target audience and it’s important to really know who these people are in order to really reach them. It’s a large part of any business and is crucial to the success of your marketing materials, your products and your business itself.