Nowadays, the customer-centric approach is a crucial part of marketing strategy in any sector. Having a well-defined target group is a solid foundation for your business and allows you to tailor your service accordingly. It helps you to focus your efforts and put your actions on the right people.
What is a target group?
Target group, by definition, is a particular group of people that our message, product and marketing actions are intended to reach. These are people who are most likely to be our customers. They have some common specified features, such as demography, interests, behaviours, needs and beliefs.
Why is it important?
The more precisely a target group is defined, the better you understand who your prospective customers are and hence the easier and more effectively you reach them. Once you know their needs, problems and expectations, you are able to design a product or a service and find solutions, which evoke pleasant emotions and create positive user experiences. Moreover, it provides you a foundation to build customer loyalty and gain customer trust, as customers feel that the project is personalized and adjusted to their needs by providing them anything they want or anything they look for.
Knowing your target group behaviours, habits, needs enable you to design relevant solutions, product functionalities, messages, choose communication channels and specify the course of marketing actions - and can consequently result in higher conversion and business success.
Not specifying your target audience, in turn, might be a waste of your valuable time and money, and to confirm I will quote a common and important saying: If you try to sell to everyone, you will end up selling to no one.
How to define it?
First, we need to specify your value proposition - it describes your product or business and shows it’s value. So now, take a while and think about what your product does? What problems does it solve? What are the benefits of using it? Why do people need it?
Once you clarify answers to these questions, it’s time to define your target group. Don’t be afraid to be highly specific, you want to avoid generalizations. You need a detailed image of your ideal customer, and User Persona is a great tool to create a hypothetical profile of your prospective customer. By defining user’s characteristics and creating a persona profile, you get much more information about your target group, such as:
-
Who is your user?
-
Why does the user want to use the product?
-
What goals does the user want to achieve with the product?
-
What problems and needs does the user have?
-
What are user’s motivations and limitations?
-
What are user’s habits?
To be more specified conduct user interviews, do researches and surveys with prospective target groups to validate and clarify your ideas and initial assumptions.
Once you are done, collect the research data and draw conclusions from analyzing your target groups. Think about implementing them into your project and your marketing strategy. Knowing your customers will enable you to choose the most effective communication channels, right messages, tailored actions, tone of voice, and help you target ads.
Conclusions
Defining target groups allows to adjust your product or business strategy, and assign certain solutions and actions to specific groups of users. Solutions which are consistent with user preferences and meet user needs enable to create positive experiences, satisfy users and strengthen relations with the brand. And as a result - making your conversions higher and actions more effective. The better you know your users, the better service you can provide.
And last, but not least - when defining target groups don’t be afraid to be specific - not including some people in your target does not stop them from buying your product. They are just not in your spotlight when it comes to specifying your strategy.
Newsletter
No spam - only valuable content!:
