What is the target audience and how to define it?

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Are you planning to open an online store or create a VK group with an audience of several thousand people? At one of the first stages, you will have to analyze the target audience (TA) of your business. How to correctly determine the portrait of your buyer, we will discuss in our article.

What is the target audience?
The target audience is a group of users united by similar characteristics (gender, age, preferences, income, etc.) and interested in purchasing your product/service.

If you know how to work with the target audience, you are one step the usage of facebook database ahead of the competition and know where to find your client and how to offer them your product. The ideally selected audience wants to buy your product or service and has enough money to do so.

What happens if there is no target audience?
In this case, you will sell your product to everyone. What is the danger of a vague target audience characteristic:

Inappropriate spending of your advertising budget: about 70% of your money will be wasted.
Product failure in the market.
For clarity, let's take different examples of describing the target audience. Who do you think uses washing powder? Most people answer: women aged 22-60 . Why is this answer bad? Because we did not take into account the characteristics of the product. We need to take into account what price category this powder is in, whether it is a well-known brand or not, for children's or colored laundry.

Let's specify our product. Let it be a cheap product, a new brand, an "automatic", for ingrained stains. Now we can more specifically outline our audience of potential buyers:

Women 23-50 years old. Housewives with small children who do not want to spend their free time doing laundry. Want to make their life easier.

This portrait of the target audience is not always enough, but now it will be easier for you to sell a pack of powder.

Target audience groups
If you are wondering how to define your target audience, first decide which market segments you will work with. In marketing, they are divided into two categories:

B2B - "business to business".
B2C - "business to consumer".
It is easier to work with the B2B segment: in this case, you work with a legal entity, and there are fewer fluctuations in the market. If you are focused on B2C, you need to be prepared for market instability: variability in the range of goods and the buyer's income level. All this affects the behavior of your target users.

Description of the target audience
Before creating a portrait, you need to understand what common characteristics your target group has. To do this, analyze the following factors:

Social : how the consumer interacts with society. Studying or working, married or single, where they live and how much they earn. All the details need to be taken into account.
Demographic : cultural values, gender, age.
Psychological : character, habits, goals, dreams of the consumer. It is good if you know how the consumer feels about the price: is he ready to pay more for the sake of service or prefers economy class goods.
Behavioral . You need to understand why a person wants to buy a product and whether he is ready to experiment with different brands.

Segmenting the target audience
To attract customers with advertising, divide the target audience into narrow groups with similar characteristics, i.e. segment it. This division will allow you to test and record positive attitudes towards your product/service more effectively.

The target segment is the group of people most receptive to purchasing. The 5W method, which is a kind of questionnaire of 5 questions, will help you determine them:

What do we offer? Summer tires for cars or baby food.
Who will use it? A young businessman with his own car or a housewife with two children.
Why does the consumer need your product? For example, a man wants to feel safe at any speed behind the wheel of his Audi. For this, he needs high-quality summer tires.
When will your product be bought? In season or during a sale.
Where can consumers buy your product? On the website, in an online store, offline.
Visualize the company's target audience. Attach a photo of a typical consumer, for example, teacher Alexander Petrovich or neighbor Ksyusha.

Once you find out the target audience’s attitude towards your brand, you can divide it into subgroups:

Devotees . They use only your products and buy from you.
Doubtful . They usually buy goods from you, but sometimes they turn to competitors.
Departed . We used to buy from you, but switched to other brands.
Inexperienced . Never been interested in your product/service, don't know anything about prices and brands.