Identifying the target audience of your small business is crucial to if you want to get any meaningful results in your internet marketing efforts. In fact this is one of the keys to overtaking your competition, and even beating out big companies.

“Why is Understanding Your Target Audience So Important?”

Great question. The answer is that once you understand your target audience intimately, then you can properly do the following:

1. you can advertise or market in the places wherever they hang out online
2. your can write advertisements that solve their problems and engage with them in compelling ways
3. your advertisements can direct them to specific pages on your website, where you can address their specific needs
4. using this approach you will have far greater conversions for whatever desired outcome that you have

Getting Started With Profiling Your Target Audience

Here’s where the cliche what, where, who, when, how questions come in handy:

• where does your target audience spend most of their time online?
• how much do they earn?
• what is their ethnicity?
• where do they typically live?
• what kind of clothes do they wear?
• what kind of language do they popularly use?
• even go so far as to create 2 or 3 fictional characters, describe their clothing, their hair, skin, eye color, their name, and so on

The More Detailed the Better

The more detailed you can get with this process, the more understanding that you are going to have about a specific market segment that you are trying to connect with. Now admittedly this segment will likely not cover all of your potential market. For example you might be involved in helping people lose weight, but within that category you will have overweight teens, overweight pregnant mothers, overweight middle aged women etc.

Ideally, for each of these segments your marketing messages and approach should be slightly tailored in order to get the most responses. This is not always practical, so I find that I have to make some compromises and tweak things as I go.

So how is your business doing with targeting specific audiences? Are you trying a one size fits all approach and is this working for you?

Related posts:

1. Hang Out With Your Target Customers To Get More Local Business
2. Generation Y – A Good Audience to Target for Financial Services
3. 5 Tips for Small Business Owners Writing Blog Content
4. How to Drastically Improve Small Business ROI by Segmenting Your Market
5. Are You Using Effective Call to Actions On Your Website?

Tagged as: internet marketing, small business, target audience