Choosing Your Audience
Picking the wrong target audience is a costly mistake, but not picking a target is worse.
The first strategic choice you have to make in marketing is which customers to focus on. It’s not enough for them to know about your product - they also need to know that your product is the right product for them. A clearly defined target audience is the first step in standing out from the crowd.
Picking the wrong target is a costly mistake, but not picking a target is worse. Deciding on a target is uncomfortable, because making a decision means commitment. It means sacricing optionality. Most founders and marketers avoid making this decision, usually until it’s too late.
To make it easier to choose a target, you should ask yourself three questions:
- What do the customers want? Take a look at the customer segment that you are considering. What unmet needs do they have? How crucial are these needs for them? How likely are they to pay for a solution?
- What do you want to achieve? Do you have the skills and the motivation to develop the right product to solve their problem? Does this customer segment align with your vision, strengths and capabilities as a company? Is this segment valuable enough to grow into a viable business?
- What does the competition look like? Can you deliver a product or service for these customers faster, cheaper or better than everybody else?
Let’s say you are a software company of four people. You have identified “Fortune 500 companies” as a valuable segment. Catering to these companies would require hiring sales teams and a patience for dealing with long sales cycles. Unless this excites you, focusing on this segment would be a distraction, regardless of how great it looks on paper.
Your goal should be to find the sweet spot of valuable customers whose needs align with your vision and capabilities, where you can deliver much higher value over your competitors.
Once you identify your target audience, make it tangible by developing an ideal customer profile. Using the insights from your research to write down a paragraph or two about a person that represents this segment as vividly as possible:
Who are they? Where do they live? What are their aspirations? What does their typical day look like? What magazines do they read? What words do they use to talk about the problem you’re solving? How do they solve the problem today? How do you anticipate that they will find out about you? Write it down.
In the end, you will have a concrete idea about what your ideal customer looks like, instead of a vague definition such as “millenials”. Getting targeting right forms the foundation of your marketing strategy and it is worth taking the time to do it right.