Target Audience

How to Target your Audience

Posted on in Small Business Tips, SME Marketing

When you’re planning your marketing activities, it’s really important to take a step back once in a while and remind yourself of your target audience and the relevance of your branding.

This may seem obvious, but when was the last time you really thought about who your prospective customers or clients are?

This is just as important whether you are a start-up business or a seasoned pro. Things change over time, and you might need to make changes as the economy, market and your own objectives evolve.

Here’s some simple pointers to get you started!

 

Ask yourself these basic questions about your target audience:

  • Who are they, eg, individuals, companies, schools, charities, are they domestic or commercial?
  • Are they small firms or larger enterprises and how many employees do they have, what’s their turnover?
  • Where are they, are they local to you or spread across the country/world?

Next you need to think about what they’re looking for and what you can offer:

  • What will they be expecting from your business?
  • What is it that they need?
  • Can you offer what they want, and if so, how can you ‘deliver’?

Now you can consider the following:

  • How would you like them to ‘think’ and ‘feel’ about your brand?
  • How can you attract them to your products and services?
  • Who else is competing for their business and how do you compare? Not just in terms of your product or service or price, but customer service too.

Once you have answered these questions, you’ll have a good backbone for creating a marketing plan and you can start to pull everything together.

To move on from this, you’ll need to decide on your style of communication – do you want/need to be very business-like, or friendly and personable? You need to use words and a style of language that will be understood by your target audience. Images too, need to be something they can relate to, they should be relevant and representative of the subject matter in hand.

Finally, two other very important parts when marketing your business and to incorporate within any campaign:

Remember to include a call to action:

  • Tell them what you want them to do! It may sound a little silly, but telling people what to do, makes it easier and more likely for them to do it. For instance, call us to discuss your needs, or log on to the website to place an order, share this article etc.
  • Try and keep your calls to action simple, straightforward and confined to one, too many and they’ll get confused or run out of time and do nothing.

Review and refine:

Once you have done all this and your marketing plan is in place and up and running, don’t forget to monitor and measure your marketing activity so that you can understand what is working and what isn’t.  There are several ways you can do this:

  • Check how many followers you have gained on social media.
  • How many enquiries are you receiving?
  • Is there an increase in visitors to, and interaction with, your website?
  • Is there a rise in footfall to your real-world store, if you have one?
  • Are your sales increasing?
  • Has your enquiry to sale ratio increased?

If you’re still not sure where to start, then Alison Page Marketing can help you find and use the right tools to market your business effectively.

Give us a call on 07963 002065 or email us at hello@alisonpagemarketing.co.uk.