How to Narrow Down Your Target Market Audience
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When you create a product or a service, finding out who you want to target is crucial. You must understand who your customers are and what they want and then tailor your plan accordingly.
For the success of a business model, narrowing down your target market must be a priority. You don’t just need to make sure people know about your product, you also need to reach the right people.
What is a Target Market?
A target market audience is a group of consumers who you think might be interested in the product or service they will provide. A target market is often segmented through age, gender, income, or purchasing preferences.
Either you identify a target market first and then create a product for them. Or you create a product and then narrow a target market.
Define Your Product
To identify your target market, you must decide what you are creating. What does it do? What problem is it solving? Then you’ll understand who would benefit from it—slowly asking these why or what questions to your marketing team will lead you to your ideal customer!
Market Research
Once you have your product, it’s time for market research. Market research involves gathering as much information as possible about customer preferences and purchasing power. You may even study your competition’s behavior to get a better idea! You can do this through surveys or interviews.
Once you have the needed information, you can tailor the product according to whatever gaps there are in the market!
Create the Ideal Customer
One effective way to proceed with market research is to create a buyer persona. By creating a fictional representation of your target audience, you can better understand their needs and preferences and tailor your marketing messages accordingly.
How to Narrow Down Your Target Market Audience
Now that you understand what an ideal target market is and how it helps your business, you must learn how to find it or narrow it down.
Undertake Market Segmentation
Market segmentation, as mentioned earlier, is simply just dividing your market into smaller groups with certain criteria. Suppose you want to sell baby products. Your market segmentation would be parents!
You can use this example for any other product you’d like to sell.
Analyzing Customer Data
As mentioned earlier, you must do market research. Once you have the data, it is crucial to analyze it efficiently. For example, if you have found people interested in baby products, how much are they willing to pay? What features are important to them? What colors do they like? These basic questions help you cater to their needs better and hence improve sales.
Testing
A/B testing involves creating two versions of a marketing message and testing them to see which one is more effective. If you are marketing luxury cars, you may use digital marketing through social media in one region and traditional marketing in another. By conducting A/B testing on different segments of your target audience, you can gain valuable insights into what messages resonate best with different groups.
Challenges with Identifying Your Target Market
You must know that it is not as easy as it sounds, and there are challenges that you might face!
Finding the Right Balance
Often marketing departments struggle with creating an audience pool that is too broad or too narrow. Let’s say your audience dynamic is too broad. Here you might not find efficient methods to get the message across. If it’s too many people, you might not even spread the message to everyone.
However, you might not find enough people to make sales if it’s too narrow. As mentioned before, the best way to do this is to create an ideal customer. For example, you can sponsor parenting influencers who might use those baby products and reach an audience for you. This approach is found to be successful because of the demand for social media talent.
Data Challenges
Depending on your budget, you might be unable to research on a large scale. Because of this, you might not have sufficient information to proceed with branding.
Changing Preferences
The world lives on trends and preferences, and trends and preferences change over time. Especially now, with social media, trends can change daily. Your product can be super hyped one day and forget about the next! So, when you gather customer data, you don’t know how long these preferences will be valid.
Conclusion
Yes, finding the right niche for your product comes with its challenges. However, when done correctly, it can make or break your idea. So, it’s important to know who the audiences for your product are, to service its intended clientele and generate revenue.
