Defining and knowing your target audience is the first step when branding your business. If you don’t know who your target market is, you might be in big trouble. You may say that you want to target everyone, but this can’t be true because if you are targeting everyone, you’re actually targeting no one. You can’t be all things to all people.
What is a Target Market?
A target market is defined as a specific, defined segment of consumers that a company plans to serve with its products or services. As mentioned above, it is an essential step in the development of products, services, and marketing efforts used to promote them. Businesses should create products, services, and marketing campaigns for a specific, well-defined group of people. To further identify your target market, you need to segment it by geography, demographics, psychographics.
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience means a narrow target market. It refers specifically to the group of consumers targeted by marketing messages. It is also a group that has significant potential to respond positively to a brand message. These people may or may not be the end-users of your product, but they are the ones you plan to direct your marketing to.
In creating your target audience, you need to first understand who they are, and what their true needs and desires are. This is because your customers need to be constantly educated about the advantages of doing business with you. You need to be able to show them how to use your products effectively and explain to them the never-ending improvement they will achieve through your products.
What’s the Difference?
These are somehow similar, overlapping terms. The key difference between them is mostly related to the practical implications each has on your business. For instance, a target market impacts all decisions a small business makes. This means that products or services are developed to meet the needs and desires of the target market. From packaging to pricing decisions, they should be made to appeal to the target market. The sales process is also structured based on the target market’s shopping preferences.
A target audience, on the other hand, only impacts decisions related to specific marketing messages. Often, the target audience for a marketing message is the same group identified as the target market. But there is some target audience that is completely different from their target market.
Once you have identified your target market and target audience, you need to uncover the market segments you should be targeting.
The first thing is to identify the key benefit your business provides. Marketing is identified as an art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers, and benefits for the stakeholders. Always define your products on the outcomes you provide for your customers, rather than the features themselves. Be clear on the benefits of your products and people will definitely buy it depending on if they want to satisfy that need.
