No matter what sort of business you are in, you will always have a target customer or target audience.
This target customer is extremely important to you and it’s critical to your business to clearly define and understand who they are – you could say that they will be the foundations to the success of your business.
Defining target customers
Defining your target customer is to set your primary audience for every aspect of your business. Everything that you do in business, especially marketing, needs to be defined by who you are trying to reach.
You can define your audience in both primary and secondary markets:
Primary: the key audience that you are trying to attract and communicate to and who will provide the most benefits to your business.
Secondary: an additional audience who is important to your business but doesn’t necessarily define it.
Why develop a target / primary customer?
By developing your target / primary customer you are creating the audience in which you design your business to. No business, large or small, has the capacity to communicate and focus on every customer all of the time, so defining your critical audience provides you with a stronger foundation to put your efforts towards. They are primarily the people who will provide the greatest value to your business.
A target audience is defined through demographics including (but not restricted to):
- Age
- Sex
- Race
- Religion
- Language
- Location
All of these considerations will allow you to establish the foundation of your brand, marketing plan, channel marketing plan, message tone and language. If you are in a physical customer environment, you can also use this information to help design the physical aspects of your office or store. By ensuring that you are putting your efforts into the area where you are most likely to achieve return, you are setting yourself up for success in both brand awareness and sales return.
Does my target customer change?
Yes, your target customer can change. It’s important to understand the seasonal aspects of your business as this could easily influence your target audience and drive your marketing focus for that period. These changes will be driven mostly by external factors, i.e. weather, rather than your business. For example, if you are selling snow gear internationally, you would focus your efforts to flow with the season based on the weather in the northern and southern hemisphere. This way you aren’t focusing efforts and trying to drive sales in a market where there is limited interest – maximising your efforts.
Similarly if you are an accountant, your peak period will be during tax time. If you are looking to promote your business in your local market you would do this in the lead up to the end of financial year.
These seasonal influences will drive a customer to want a need or product more than if you are in the off season. Tax returns can only be done once a year and people like to receive their returns quickly so the demand for accounting services would likely to be highest from 1 July until October. As customers are only required to do a tax return once per year, your efforts should be spent in promoting yourself to your customers in the lead up directly prior to and then during the first part of the season.
If you are selling products, the seasonal influences can cause challenges in your business if you don’t monitor and prepare for them adequately. If you purchase products that are only “valuable” to the customer, or their interest is only seasonal, then you need to clear these when their is a market for them. Not doing this will result in you your stock becoming aged and you may need to look at a clearance plan. Any remaining stock will have an impact on your cash flow especially if your strategy was to clear it all during the season.
This isn’t to say that you wouldn’t do any promotional or marketing activity during your off season. You can reduce your spend and effort during the quieter periods but there is always opportunity to keep your business front of mind by keeping a form of marketing presence to maintain awareness and ensure that you are part of the consideration set when customers are ready to make a decision.
Customers are the foundation of every business so it’s critical to continued success that you define your customers and make sure that they are at the centre of every business decision and communication that you do. By not understanding your customers properly, you have the potential to lose potential sales or reduce your performance which will have an impact on your overall business success.
Good Luck.
The Marketing Elf
August 2017