WFW - Writing for Your Target Audience (Lesson)

 

Writing for Your Target Audience

Businesses strive to meet the wants and needs of consumers. For each business, there is a special group that is focused on with regard to purchasing its products or services. This special group of consumers has characteristics that sett them apart from other consumers because they share a more common set of interests that the individual business caters to. This special group of consumers that businesses focus on is called a target market.  

Today, many businesses make decisions based on who their target market is. A business cannot think about making a profit without knowing what motivates its target market to make purchases. A business should not make decisions about marketing strategies without understanding what its target market’s interests are. A business should not create a website without knowing what drives its target market to its website and what captures its attention once the site is accessed.

Finding Your Target Market

How can businesses find their potential customers? They must be able to reach specific customers and know their wants and needs. To do this, businesses need to study these potential customers to create the most accurate customer profile. This takes time, effort, and research. To start, businesses need to break down their target market into segments.

Market Segmentation

Businesses position themselves for maximum competitive advantage. To accomplish this, they divide their target market into subsets of prospective customers with distinct needs, preferences, characteristics, or behaviors known as market segmentation. The market is broken down into the following segments:

• Geographic
• Demographic
• Psychographic

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation creates target market groups based on geographical boundaries. One example of a geographical boundary is location. The location can include a region, state, or neighborhood.  Another boundary is the climate. Is the area hot, rainy, or temperate? Understanding the climate of an area and its region can help businesses make decisions on the appropriate mediums of advertising and expansion of their business.

Demographic Segmentation

Demographic segmentation is the most popular form of segmentation. It is closely related to wants, needs, and usage rates. Take a look at the diagram to learn more about the variables that make up the demographic segmentation.

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation creates its target market group based on lifestyle. The variables researched are the potential customers’ activities, interests, and opinions (AIOs). Questions asked about this target market segment are:

• What type of lifestyle do they have?
• What do they value?
• What are their personality characteristics?
• What social class do they belong to?

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation focuses on how potential customers interact with a business or website. This market segment identifies the most engaged customers. By segmenting their customers by behavior, a business can get an extensive look at how they can fine-tune their messaging, brand, and most importantly their products or services to stay ahead of the competition.

Market Research Techniques

While there are many ways to perform market research, most businesses use one or more of the five basic methods:

• surveys
• focus groups
• personal interviews
• observation
• field trials

Surveys

Taking a survey is a great way for a business to gather information about its target market. There are several ways to give a survey.

• In-person surveys are one-on-one interviews.
• Telephone surveys are less expensive than in-person surveys but costlier than mail.
• Mail surveys are a relatively inexpensive way to reach a broad audience.
• Online surveys.

What questions are important to ask?

1. How much would they spend on your product?
2. What other products/services do they purchase that is/are like yours?
3. What are their gender, race, and location?
4. What is their income?

Focus groups

In focus groups, a moderator uses a scripted series of questions or topics to lead a discussion among a group of people. This research technique is used to collect data through group interaction.

Personal interviews

Like focus groups, personal interviews include unstructured, open-ended questions. The personal interview is normally a preliminary step in the research process to gain ideas and information.

Observation

When you observe consumers in action by videotaping them in stores, at work, or home, you can observe how they buy or use a product. This gives you a more accurate picture of customers' usage habits and shopping patterns.

Field trials

Placing a new product in selected stores to test customer response under real-life selling conditions can help determine product modifications, the need to adjust prices, or improve packaging.

Once an organization has created its customer profile, it must decide whether to target one market segment or several segments.

 IMAGES CREATED BY GAVS