You’ve started a business. You want to begin digital marketing efforts to drive traffic to your business and increase sales. Before getting started, it is important to define your target audience. 

Determining your target audience is an important step early in the planning process for your business. Knowing your target audience and how to reach them is the best way to create tailored marketing and to ultimately drive sales. A deep understanding of your audience creates a customer-centric approach that can increase the likelihood of your product or service and its respective messaging are well-received by potential customers.

When a business fails to understand their target audience it can lead to poorly designed products, services that don’t fully meet the consumer’s needs, messaging that does not reach the intended audience, lowered customer satisfaction, lack of return business, and ultimately low return on investment. 

From a marketing standpoint, some negative situations that can arise from not fully understanding your target audience are:

Messaging that is irrelevant

Communications that do not align with the audience’s needs and pain points will likely be dismissed. For example, if you are a pet food brand creating messaging for cat owners, you would likely want to avoid adding in messaging about the latest ingredients in your dog food. The user would not find this messaging interesting or useful, therefore it would likely cause the user to ignore the messaging, because it would not feel tailored to their needs.

Low Engagement 

Knowing your target audience prevents you from creating content that does not resonate with them. If messaging feels irrelevant to the consumer, they are not likely to engage with the content. This can lead to low click-through rates, low number of conversions, and low engagement rates. When people are not engaging with your messaging, it can lead to lowered sales. If your business is not able to deliver the level of value or provide the experience that your audience desires, leading to lost customers and the need to invest more in other prospects, such as your competitors.

Not to mention knowing your audience can help determine the channel with which you are trying to reach your audience. Different audiences usually engage with different marketing channels and platforms. If you don’t understand your audience, you might neglect channels that could be best for reaching and engaging with them.

Wasted Resources 

When the messaging fails to address the target audience’s needs, it becomes a waste of resources. Both time and money are spent on digital marketing. When digital messaging does not produce the desired result of increased traffic or sales, the time and money spent on these efforts are wasted. Understanding your audience is crucial for making informed decisions that maximize the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising efforts and minimize spend that will not lead to return on investment.

In order to reach your audience, you must understand their needs. This allows your business to create products, services, and marketing campaigns that meet these needs and address any pain points potential customers might experience. This can range from product design and user experience, to choosing the channels and messaging to use for marketing efforts. Understanding these needs can help to ensure resources are not wasted on messaging that may not resonate effectively with the target audience.

​​To effectively understand your target audience, consider using tools such as market research, surveys, existing customer feedback, and historical analytics. This valuable data can guide your decisions regarding product development, user experience design, and marketing strategy. As the business grows, continuously gather insights from these tools and adjust your strategies based on this knowledge to stay up-to-date with ever-evolving customer expectations. By addressing your audience’s needs and pain points, the relevance and impact of your business’s messaging and help to maintain better customer relationships.