Have you ever driven your car without having any idea of your final destination? No, because that would be a waste of time and money, since the fuel spent would lead to nothing…
The same thing happens when you don't define a target for your campaigns and your marketing strategy in general.
The marketing target is defined by the audience that shares characteristics common to the company's customers. The goal is to establish the typical profile of a person likely to buy your product or service. This practice helps you break a broad market into segments to focus on a specific group (and optimize your marketing campaigns).
Defining your ideal audience is therefore a crucial step. But how do you define your marketing target?
1. Conduct market research
Start by carrying out a study to analyze all aspects of the market you want to address. You can do this by performing a SWOT analysis SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. In French: Forces, Faiblesses, Opportunités, Menaces.
Classic but always effective, this method allows you to identify:
- Your target's location: local, national or international
- Demographic data: age, gender, occupation, income level, marital status…
- Psychographic data: values, hobbies, lifestyle, personality, attitude, behavior…
- Industries: medicine, accounting, non-profit organizations, manufacturing…
- Market trends
- Economic changes
- Customer buying habits
- Competition
Knowing all these factors is the first step to help you identify your marketing target.
2. Create detailed buyer personas
After gathering all this information about your market, you can create the ideal buyer profile. Asking who your buyer is lets you analyze and answer a number of essential targeting questions, such as:
- Age: which age group or age range is your product or service aimed at?
- Financial situation: can your market segment afford your offer and how often will they buy your product?
- Gender: male, female, both… who makes up the majority of your target?
- Occupation: how does their professional activity affect their purchasing decisions?
- Life situations: position, role, employer (or company size), family life, marital status, place of residence…
These data will help you build typical audience profiles for your Google ad campaigns or social networks. But you need to gather information that will allow you to craft your marketing message.
To do this, you must also determine the emotional needs and values of your target. Which brings us to the next point...
3. Define the emotional needs of your marketing target
What do your potential ideal customers appreciate, find exciting and interesting? What is their dominant behavior or personality, what are their opinions on certain events and lifestyles?
Answering these questions determines your audience's emotional needs as well as their values.
Another question then arises: what is THE quality your target can identify with?
Answering this question will help you create memorable, clearly positioned marketing campaigns that are recognizable to your prospects.
For example:
- The value promoted by chains like Naturalia and Biocoop is environmentalism
- A brand like Red Bull emphasizes energy and self-transcendence
- Apple's image is built on style, but also accessibility
- Blédina conveys family values
- Le Slip Français capitalizes on Made-in-France craftsmanship and the 'buy French' trend
By finding the value that connects you to your prospects and customers, you will act directly on their emotions, which will make your marketing campaigns more effective.
4. Understand pain points
Value is an important element in decision-making, but don't forget the prospect's primary pain point. WHY does your prospect need your products or services? What will you help them do?
Like any problem, consumers' pain points are as diverse as your potential customers themselves. However, not all prospects will be aware of the problems they face, which can make your marketing strategy more difficult, because you need to make them aware of the issue.
Moreover, pain points are not always problems. They can be a goal to achieve or a need for optimization. They can be grouped into four areas:
- Financial Your prospects are spending too much money on their current provider/solution/product and want to reduce their expenses.
- Productivity Your prospects are losing time using their current provider/solution/product or want to use their time more efficiently.
- Management Your prospects want to improve a daily process, an action, or a task that takes too much time or consumes too many resources (financial, organizational, or human).
- Support Your prospects are not receiving the guidance or support they need when using a service or within a strategy. This also covers customers who find the good or service too complex to use.
By considering these “categories,” you can begin to think about your company's marketing positioning while refining your target audience.
5. Understand your target's motivations
Your prospects have a pain point, okay. They are therefore motivated to solve it. But what will motivate them to choose YOUR company?
Identifying a trigger factor linked to the personality of your marketing target will help you reach them during the decision process. This is essential for writing your sales pages, marketing ads and even your product descriptions.
If we take some of the brands mentioned earlier in this article, here are the motivations that drive their consumers:
- Naturalia: In addition to its organic and bulk products, the chain is committed to environmental initiatives. That makes the difference for the most engaged consumers.
- Red Bull: There are many energy drinks on the market, but Red Bull remains the most visible at sporting events. Customers choose it for that image of quality: if it sponsors extreme sports, it's because it's effective.
- Apple: when a consumer chooses Apple, it's for the brand's recognized high-end quality and the image of a certain lifestyle it projects. That gives buyers a sense of belonging.
6. Know your existing customers
One of the best ways to identify your company's marketing target is to get to know your existing customers. You can obtain the five elements mentioned earlier through:
- Review of your website : this can help you learn your visitors' profiles, how they navigate, and which pages are most viewed. You thus identify socio-demographic parameters as well as your visitors' main needs.
- Review of your social media : with the statistics provided by the various platforms, you also learn the socio-demographic profile of your subscribers, as well as their connection habits.
- Surveys : you can learn more about the needs, values, and motivations of your target market by sending questionnaires to your customers. By email, via SMS, or even on social media, don't hesitate to carry out satisfaction surveys or ask occasional questions. You could obtain valuable data.
- Reviews : what do your customers' reviews on your website or on specialist sites say? Again, you can obtain relevant feedback for your business.
7. Analyze the competition
If you don't yet have an existing customer base (and even if you do, actually), look at what your competitors are doing! This practice will help you understand the profile of your own audience.
Dig through their website, blog, social media pages and ads to understand their strategy. During your investigation, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are their segmentation techniques?
- Who is their ideal customer?
- Do they have a specific target market or multiple target markets? Which target market(s) and why?
- How do they promote their products? What language do they use? Which product features do they emphasize?
- What is their publishing schedule? How often do they post or send emails?
Get to know your competitors as if you were their customer. Subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on social media to gather useful insights.
8. Identify opportunities with competitor mapping
A good way to identify a target market for your website or your marketing campaign is to use the competitive mappingIt is a simple diagram that allows you to identify gaps in the market or the industry in which your product/service/website operates.
To create it:
- Draw a Y axis and a perpendicular X axis to create four different sections.
- Write your customers' main criteria on each axis (for example, one axis "age" and another "income", or one axis "need" and another "product quality").
- Plot all your competitors on this chart according to their clientele.
Once you have finished plotting all your competitors, look for empty spaces on the chart. That is where there is a gap in the market.
With this method, you can easily find your niche and identify your target. For example, you may find that there are many offers for formal, experienced professionals, but few aimed at occasional professionals.
Conclusion
Defining your target is the crucial phase of any business activity and marketing campaign. After this step, you will be better able to determine your audiences, craft your message, choose your visuals, and select the most appropriate content to achieve your marketing and commercial goals!
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