Judy Musgrove

Mr. Skeeter ~ 10 months old ~ we have made it to round 5! Help us get to round 6!

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4 Ways To Define Your Target Audience

The lifeline of any business is its customers (AKA Target Audience). Regardless of how long you have been operating in the industry, it is crucial that you secure customers which can be done by knowing who your target audience is. Doing so can help set you on the right track.

Identifying your target audience and what matters to them will empower you in coming up with strategies that would be useful in engagement, content creation, and other marketing efforts. Though, before digging into the ways on how to define your target audience, you should have a clear understanding of what it is.

Defining “Target Audience” . . .

A target audience is a group of people you’re making your product or service offerings for. While the marketing industry usually interchanges the terms target audience and target market, it should be noted that these are separate groups.

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While your target market is the group you’re intending to reach out to for sales, your target audience is the subset of this that is served with particular campaigns. Defining the latter will require more specific details. Therefore, let’s get started now to finally understand how to distinguish them and understand why it is important to succeed as a marketer.

Set and consider your marketing goals. It should be clear to you why you’re searching for a certain audience to target which could be most likely due to a new marketing initiative. If so, keep in mind the specific goals of your company’s campaign ranging from engagement to actual sales. The said goals will serve as your compass when determining the audience you need to reach out to. Knowing exactly what you’re aiming for will be translated into what your team will eventually do and reflect it to the outputs ready for consumption. Therefore, it’s a must to strengthen the core of your initiatives to build brand awareness and loyalty among your target audience.

Go over your existing audience. If you already have an audience, it would be useful to dive deep into who they are and what they particularly like about your brand. You can use such data in narrowing down your target audience after consulting with the available sources online such as social media analytics and Google analytics. For instance, the Facebook Audience Insights can help you specify your target audience as you learn more about them once you’ve selected criteria (i.e., age, location, interests) and see for yourself the trends in their behavior. Meanwhile, Google Analytics can help you for viewing your website’s visitors and accessing information that includes their gender, languages, and ages among other things. You’ll also get to have an insight into the kind of content that resonates with them the most.

Design audience personas. Of course, more than their basic details, you would want to personally connect with them which could be achieved through creating buyer or audience personas. If you do not have an existing audience to base this on, you can simply conduct market research where you’ll have a better idea with the help of customer insights including their lifestyle, buying habits, social media behaviors, and the like. You can use this information in building the personas which have two aspects namely their demographics and psychographics.  Demographics are some criteria that you can utilize to specify a group of people while psychographics helps you to define the personality of your audience. Select at least two identifiers once you’ve gathered the relevant data from your customers’ characteristics. You can also distinguish the subgroups within your target audience which are based on their interests, personality traits, and behaviors. Afterward, you can mull over which ones are aligned with your goals. It is crucial to determine the groups you don’t want to target as well. This would help the team comprehend who exactly their talking to and ultimately craft tailor-fitted messaging and solutions.

Study your competitors’ audiences. It wouldn’t hurt to look at your competitors since they essentially produce the same outputs as yours. Give special attention to the kind of visitors they attract as well as the respective pain points they address. You can research them through trade expos or shows that they’ve launched and even through their social media. Do pulse checking on the common trends that your niche is also into before evaluating what can be absorbed into your own process of narrowing down your target audience. Learn how to fill the gaps by considering what your competitors are missing and what you’ll rather highlight from consumers’ data. By doing this, you can come up with solutions that could also attract consumers who aren’t happy with your competitors’. 

It is certainly imperative for your company to undergo the process of defining your target audience despite its trickiness. This will greatly support you in culling out the right marketing approach to attain your business goals. Make it practice to also gather feedback from your audience once you’ve identified them and have them try your products and services. Doing all these will only help you keep getting better results.

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Marketing Basics:

How To Be Your Own Marketing Department . . . . .

As an entrepreneur, you wear many hats. In addition to being the idea creator and personal accountant, you also need to learn how to advertise your products and become your own marketing department of sorts. It may be a daunting task but with some insight and education, you can learn the terms and best practices to help make your business a success. Here at Judy’s Business Blog, we love to help women entrepreneurs thrive, so we have some advice on how to make the most of your personal marketing efforts.

Define Your Strategy and Marketing Channels

In order to effectively promote your product, you have to create a well-defined marketing strategy. There are many different strategies that you can try, and they could include anything from spreading the word of your products on social media, volunteering to speak at local business groups, or co-marketing with another business, among other options.

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Along with defining your strategy, you also need to make a decision on which marketing channels you will focus on to spread the word about your product. There are several tried and true marketing channels that have worked for years, including direct selling, digital advertisements, email marketing, and SEO.

The key is to determine which channel is best for your product and business. If you have a digital product, then you may want to focus on the online space. If you have a physical product or something that requires more explanation, then direct selling (where a salesperson speaks directly to customers) may be best. You can use more than one marketing channel to advertise your product.

Messaging

Next, you will need to think about your messaging approach. In essence, messaging is how a company talks about itself and the value it provides. When you think about messaging, you will want to answer the what, who, and why of your company and products. What is the goal of your advertising? Who is your audience? Why should customers decide to buy from your company when they have so many options?

You don’t necessarily need to be long-winded when it comes to your messaging as being succinct is a good way to keep your goals on track. Look at your company and write down some clear and concise sentences that will showcase your product in the best light possible while also telling your audience everything they need to hear to make an informed decision. Your messaging should also always include a call to action like “visit this link” or “register now” so you can more easily get your customers through the door.

Look At Your Results

Take your time to create a detailed marketing strategy and the perfect messaging for your customers and then release your plan out into the wild. After you get out the message, run analytics and determine if your strategy is working. One way to determine if you are finding success is to look at metrics on your website, such as your bounce rate. How long are people staying on your website? If they are only there for a few seconds and then quickly leave, then you need to look at your marketing strategy and decide whether your words are matching the expectations of your product.

There are many signs that your marketing is not working, such as a lack of sales conversions, limited engagement from your audience, or that you are not meeting your sales objectives. Don’t worry. You haven’t failed. Instead, you just need to go back to your strategy and make the proper tweaks and try it again. As you can see, there are steps that you can take to become your own marketing department and bring your company to the next level. If, at first, you don’t succeed, then try, try again. If you need more advice about marketing or business in general, contact Judy at [email protected].

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Working Remotely? How Secure Are You?

Working remotely is becoming the norm. I heard from Lucas Stewart, from Cable Compare who reached out to share a great link and information on this very topic. Cable Compare covers several topics, such as the internet, streaming, TV, and much more. This article is about your internet security

Did you know?

$1.5 Billion dollars are lost each year because of phishing

A Cyberattack occurs every 39 seconds

94% of all malware arrives by email

Cybercrime costs the economy around $500 Billion a year

The average cost a company incurs because of a cyber attack is 1.6 Million

60 % of small businesses close if they suffer from a cyberattack

Human error is behind 90% of all data breaches

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Educate Yourself ~ A Top Priority

This is not only scary, it is downright horrific. Understanding the threats that we all may experience and what to do about them is key. This article outlines what you can do about them. “The Top Threats Facing Your Home Office”.

Food for thought. Knowing what the top threats facing your home office are is key! Data Theft, Identity Theft, Viruses, Malware, Ransomware, and Cyberbullying are just the tip of the iceberg.

Last but not least, the article explains what you need to do to stay safe. Nothing is 100%, but minimizing these threats will give you peace of mind. It takes discipline but I am more relaxed, can think clearly, work at my speed, and best of all, if something comes up that I have to take care of, I can, then I sit back down and finish what I was working on.