Marketing to your Target Audience

Who is your target audience? Males? Females? Children? Teens? Twenty-somethings? Active-duty military? Senior citizens? Where do they live? What type of lifestyle are they accustomed to? Most importantly, what do they want from you?

These are all important questions that you need to answer if you hope to have any measurable success in marketing your products or services online (or even offline for that matter), and they're not as easy to answer as you might think. Despite their best efforts, many businesses make the mistake of launching marketing campaigns without an accurate understanding of their target audiences, and end up "barking up the wrong tree."

For example, if you ran a bath and spa company that specialized in offering scented lotions, soaps, and anti-aging creams made with natural ingredients, one of the main target audiences you might imagine first is women, simply based on your assumption that women would care more about the ingredients and scent of their soap than men. You might not stop to consider the potential of marketing your products to men as gifts for their girlfriends, wives, mothers, etc., nor the growing demand for men's anti-aging products.

You might not think to categorize and market your products according to the five dermatologist-and-aestetician-recognized skin types, or to people recovering from surgery who may have extremely sensitive skin during recovery and need something free of chemicals to avoid any allergic reactions.

These are exactly the types of questions that Niche Marketing PR client Castle Baths began asking themselves and us, and the answers and research we came up with together paved the way for their newest anti-aging cream - designed specifically for people with post-operative sensitive skin and available in a men's and women's line.

How do you know if there's a new market out there?

That's where we at Niche Marketing PR come in. If you suspect that there's a new market that you're not reaching, or if your growth has fallen flat and you're looking for new opportunities, we can help you conduct the market research and data analyses you'll need to estimate your potential profits and risk. We use a variety of information gathering techniques unique to online marketing to include:

• Customer studies (It's like a focus group, but without any physical people - the people we use real customer data from your existing website to test new ideas.)
• Web analytics (we search the Internet for popular searches related to the concept you propose to us, and then come up with keywords likely to draw attention to your site from people searching on that topic.)
• Heat mapping tracking (we can tell exactly how your customers are using your website, and what they're clicking on the most.)

Don't forget to assess your competition too!

Who are your main competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What sets you apart from them, and why should people choose you over anyone else? These are all important questions to ask yourself once you have identified your target audiences, but before you start marketing to them. After all, to beat your competition in the race to reach these audiences, you need to know what you're up against.

Don't make the mistake of being too selective in who you define as a competitor either. You need to compete not only with those who offer the same or a similar product or service to yours, but also anything and everything that can accomplish your product or service's end goal. For example, if you ran a busing company, you may consider your company to be in the busing industry and identify other busing companies as your main competition. While this is partially true, you're also in the transportation industry, and need to compete with rental cars, airlines, trains, monorails, and other forms of public and private transportation.

Niche Marketing PR can help you gather data on who your competitors are, and what online marketing methods they are using to reach your target audiences using a similar set of web analytics tools to the one we will use to assess your website. Give us a call at (757) 788-8157 to schedule a consultation today!