How to Appeal to Your Business’s Target Audience

World map

How to Appeal to Your Business’s Target Audience

As an entrepreneur, the success of your business depends largely on whether you can reach your target market. Your target audience is the group of people or market segment you had in mind while planning the business. These are the people who will be using your products or taking advantage of the service you offer. Some businesses tend to try to reach a broad spectrum of people, of all ages and from all locations. This can be costly and inefficient. Trying to reach a general audience is less likely to generate more sales, as compared to when a specific market is targeted. The business will tend to spread itself too thin resulting to lost opportunities and wasted marketing. It is more cost-effective to identify a target market and focus your marketing on that set of people.

Some people think that putting up a business is as easy as 1-2-3; Find a place, put up a sign, and sell. That is not so. Admittedly, setting your logo in a pop display can make the business stand out from a group of like businesses, such as in a mall or a row of stores in the market. However, it will take more than a sign to actually reach your target audience and keep them.

 

Think Geography

Wherever your business may be located, you must decide where you will be focusing your marketing skills. If you decide to give out flyers or post ads, limiting yourself geographically will save you in terms of costs, as well as enable you to reach more people within your target location. Reaching 1000 people in the adjacent towns or sections in the city will be more cost effective and profitable than reaching 1000 people across 10 cities. Also, a bigger geographical target will expose you to more market rivals.

 

Residential or Commercial

Residential markets and commercial markets are two different sets of people. They will require different approaches and will have different needs. For example, commercial clients might have bigger needs but they may also have contracts with more established businesses. On the other hand, residential clients will have far smaller needs, but there may be more of them, resulting to more potential clients for your business. If you have a small business, it will be more logical to choose one of the two, until the business has grown large and stable enough to enter another market segment.

 

Age Group

Depending on the product, choosing the right age bracket to target is a sensible step. For example, when marketing apparel, it is important to decide which age bracket to target—teens (12-17), young professionals (18-24), young parents (25-34), and so on. This distinction can affect the next steps you take to market your product. For example, the 12-17 group will have more access to social networks but they also lack the purchasing power. The 18-24 and 25-34 age group will check their emails more regularly than the 35-45-year-olds. Thus, as a business owner, email marketing can be more effective to reach them than other traditional marketing techniques.

 

Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing and advertising include door-to-door advertising, flyers, newspaper ads, and TV commercials. When dealing with a smaller geographic location, a small business owner can do well to go door-to-door to potential clients to introduce the business, as well as leave something to make the product memorable, in this case novelty gift items. For example, if you have a small laundry business offering laundry pickup and delivery, an effective marketing technique is to go door-to-door in nearby apartment buildings and introduce the business by giving them a small laundry bag stamped with your logo, address, and telephone number for laundry pickup and delivery inquiries. It will entail costs, but it is a targeted approach that will leave a mark on your potential client.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *