Understand Your Website's Target Market
So, what is a TARGET MARKET?
DEFINITION:
A target market (a.k.a. ‘target audience’, or just ‘audience’) is the end consumer to which the company wants to sell its end products too. Target marketing involves breaking down the entire market into various segments and planning marketing strategies accordingly for each segment to increase the market share.
In simple words, not all products can be consumed by all customers and each product has a different set of consumers who want to purchase the product.
Creating the target market involves conceptualizing the product, understanding the need of the product in a market, studying its target audience, etc.
That still sounds pretty technical, but luckily, making sense of your audience doesn't need to be a scary procedure. There are various steps involved in defining the target market. Follow these three stages to guarantee that whenever you inform somebody regarding your brand, you're communicating in their language.
1. BUILD THE FOUNDATION
The fundamental initial step to imparting to your crowd is to comprehend who they are on a demographic level. Think about the different individuals you're focusing on your brand, and answer the accompanying inquiries for each one:
What is their age?
What is their gender?
What is their ethnicity, race, and cultural background?
What is their education level?
What is their religion?
What is their economic status?
What is their sexual orientation?
For every segment you sketched out, form an example "individual" from that information (if you're a visual person, transform this into character profiles).
What's her name?
How old is she?
What does she earn?
Is she single? married? divorced?
Does she have children?
Your audience won't be the same, so making a bunch of "model clients" can be much easier.
“Fake” A.I. Generated Photo
🤭 ODD TIP
During this process, you can even select portraits for your ideal personas. Some people literally print these personas and pin them to the wall of their writing space.
The ability of AI to generate fake visuals is not yet mainstream knowledge, but a new website — ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com — offers a quick and persuasive education.
The site is the creation of Philip Wang, a software engineer at Uber, and uses research [released in 2018] by chip designer Nvidia to create an endless stream of fake portraits. The algorithm behind it is trained on a huge dataset of real images, then uses a type of neural network known as a [generative adversarial network] to fabricate new examples.
2. IDENTIFY THE LAYERS
When you have your audience better-defined, it's a good time to burrow further to identify who they really are. This is called "psychographics," or the attributes relating to personality, attitudes, values, interests, or lifestyles that will allow you to better understand what your target audience cares about, and why.
What are her…
✏️ Habits?
✏️ Values?
✏️ Interests?
✏️ Opinions?
✏️ Attitudes?
Now, overlay these psychographics on each of your demographic profiles.
What does each “person” care about?
Worry about?
What does she like to do in her spare time?
While there are no standard psychographic profiles (for example, not all 35-year old females have children and not all high school grads want to enlist in the military), you can make some general assumptions about the people you’re trying to target, e.g., start by thinking about 35-year old females who do have children or high school students who do want to enlist in the military, and build their profiles from there.
3. REVIEW AND REFINE
Since you've characterized and learned more about your key audience, you can tailor your brand message— ensuring that your story will be relevant to each group. Take the key messages you've created for your company, and consider how you can adjust them for every one of your audience profiles.
Consider certain demographics—people in different age groups or geographic areas, for example.
Which of your key messages are most (and least) relevant to each group?
Are there interesting stories that would help strengthen your message to a particular audience?
Throughout this process, it can be helpful to check out the competition as well. You cannot really know every move they make, but you can see how THEY market to THEIR customers. Who are your competitors targeting, and how? How do their messages shift based on the different audiences they’re targeting?
When you’re done with this exercise, you’ll have a much better look at the people and groups your brand is targeting.
Just remember—there are real people behind the demographics, psychographics, and the character profiles you drafted. You can start by guessing what they might want and what messages might resonate—but there’s no substitute for getting real input and feedback.
Listen to your audience, engage them in meaningful conversations, test your ideas and the assumptions you’ve made, and refine your messages as you learn more. Soon, you’ll be able to talk about your brand to all your key audiences—and all in their own unique language!
Character Profile Generator
To create a story as real to life as possible, Scriptwriters are tasked with creating their character's profiles. To make it easy, there are many online Character Profile Generators that can help quickly build a profile's background. This site's example takes it really far, and creates friends, parents and even exes! It might be useful, or just fun. Cheers! character-generator.org.uk