Steps to Find Your Target Audience

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a group of people for which your business will build a product or service. By design, you are specifically addressing a customer problem of your target audience, and as a consequence, the target audience is the group that is most likely to relate to your product positioning and messaging.

The target audience is often used as the target segment, customer segment, target market, etc. Below, we will describe the nuances between these terms.

Why Is the Target Audience Important?

Building a business without a specific target audience means creating a generic product or service that is equally unappealing to everyone.

For a product to “click” with its customer, it has to address an important or painful problem that the customer has. Such a perfect match comes from a deep understanding of your target customers.

But having a good product is not enough. It needs to be positioned and communicated to customers to make them connect with it. Product messaging and positioning can be a deal-breaker in achieving market success.

Different customer segments tend to describe their problem and the solution they are working for with specific words and jargon. Understanding how a customer perceives a given product can make a huge difference in your product messaging and its effectiveness.

Steps to Find Your Target Audience

The next steps will guide you through identifying your target audience. This method works for new products and services that are still being developed and for existing businesses that want to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Step 1: Analyze Your Product or Service

Start with the problem you want to solve, or you are currently solving. Describe the problem and who would benefit the most from it. Don’t try to think about the broadest group of people possible - the narrower the group, the more targeted the messaging will be. This step aims to give you a broad understanding of the type of people you want to continue your research with.

Step 2: Research Your Current or Potential Target Customers

This is the most important step. At this point, you have identified a broad group of people. The next step is to find people in this group and conduct customer interviews with them.

The result of the customer interviews will be that:

• Some of the people you talk to don’t have the problem you want to solve, or the problem is insignificant to them
• Some people will describe the problem differently from others, using specific words and emotions
• Existing alternatives for solving the customer problem will arise as interviewees explain how they solve the problem today, not knowing about your product.

You can start breaking down multiple customer segments by identifying repeating themes from the points above.

One of the most important factors when conducting customer interviews is to avoid introducing biases. Sometimes, just how you phrase your questions can significantly change how people answer them. Moreover, when analyzing the interviews, we tend to focus more on people who confirm our hypothesis and ignore those whose stories don’t support the business idea.

Icanpreneur is a platform that can help you conduct customer interviews without introducing biases. It will prepare a customized script based on the customer problem you are focusing on and use the latest technologies to extract insights from your conversations based on industry best practices.

Step 3: Create a Buyer Persona

Once you have gathered all the detailed information about your customer segments, it’s time to compose that knowledge into buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character representing key attributes and features of your target customers. These customer profiles are used during product development and to inform the go-to-market strategy. For more detailed information about this step, check out the Complete Guide for Buyer Persona together with some Buyer Persona Examples.

Step 4: Test and Refine

After your detailed analysis, you will have a hypothesis about what product messaging through which traction channels would engage your target customers.

To test this hypothesis, you can create experiments showing how successful your messaging engages your audience. There are many ways to prepare and execute such experiments:

• Using Google Ads, you can create multiple versions and compare their performance with that of the audience. This is one of the most scientifically reliable methods to evaluate the effectiveness of your product messaging.
• A landing page with a call to action button that asks visitors for an email or some other way to express their interest in what you plan to offer.

Target Audience Examples

Tesla

“Eco-conscious urban commuters seeking efficient daily transportation”

SpaceX

If you are building a B2B business, instead of defining your customer segment as the organizations think about which people in those organizations will be interested in your product. Companies don’t buy products; people in those companies do. SpaceX is a good example of a company that sells primarily to other organizations:

• “CEOs of space tourism companies looking for reliable transportation options”
• “Scientific researchers in universities and institutes needing frequent access to microgravity environments”

This will help you prepare a more detailed plan about how to reach out to those people.

Uber

Marketplace type of businesses like Uber have two distinct types of personas and need to define their target audience from both sides of the market:

• Travelers in new places have convenient, safe, and familiar transportation when abroad.
• A full-time employee with a car and a driving license needs additional income in his spare time.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

Assuming you know your audience without research

This is one of the most frequent mistakes. Especially when solving a problem that people experience themselves, they assume they completely understand the target customer and their pain points. This usually leads to premature investment in product development or going straight to the market with messaging that doesn’t resonate.

In other cases, people with the same problem as you are not enough to sustain your business. All these pitfalls can be avoided by talking to potential customers and hearing their stories about the problem you plan to tackle.

Sticking rigidly to an audience that no longer fits your product

Product-market fit is not a static achievement you acquire one day and have it forever. On the contrary, it’s a process that requires constant nurturing.

Your product changes, as do the needs of your customers. Over time, there will be a group of people that are no longer a good fit either because they need a different product or because your product has evolved into something different. It’s important to acknowledge that in those cases and prepare a plan to move on.

If you want to retain that customer segment, can you offer them an adjacent product? If you plan to disengage from that customer segment, how will this affect your business, and do you need to attract a new group to keep your metrics in check?

Failing to differentiate between B2C and B2B

The buying process significantly differs between selling to consumers vs. other businesses. Buying decisions for consumers are usually quicker, made by one person, and the product needs to focus specifically on the buyer’s needs.

In companies, there are usually multiple stakeholders involved. Often, the buyer is not the product user, and there will be multiple additional requirements from accounting, legal, and security perspectives that could be dealbreakers. However, the deals in the B2B segment are usually significantly bigger than the consumer segment.

Reaching out to the customer is also very different. B2C channels, such as influencers, social networks, or flyers, can be completely inappropriate in a business context where you reach out directly to potential customers.

Overlooking niche markets

Ignoring smaller, more specific groups can mean missing significant business opportunities. Most business owners want to win the whole market, and this is a great goal. However, starting small and gradually building from the initial niche customer segment can help you get quick wins in spaces that are getting less attention from competitors and are left underserved. It will give you the focus to create a delightful customer experience that addresses exactly the problems of your niche segment instead of starting with a mediocre product for a broader audience.

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