Selecting a target audience for your marketing (the basics)

If you’re just getting started marketing a small business in the health/wellbeing space, taking the time to plan out your strategy is a smart move. And if you’re new to small business marketing strategy, the first step on your marketing plan should be selecting a target audience.

It's the ideal first step, because as marketers, our audience, and our ability to serve and understand them, is at the heart of everything we do. And by taking the time to properly narrow down your audience before you start marketing, you'll be preparing your business for a variety of other marketing techniques that require a focused audience to work properly.

A common misconception

For some of my clients, when they hear the term ‘target audience’, they become a little hesitant. But don’t worry, we’re not talking about limiting the customers your business serves, just the types of customers your business markets to.

That’s an important difference, because what it really means it that you can implement this technique, and narrow down your marketing efforts to focus on a specific customer type, whilst still continuing to serve all of your usual customers as normal.

Why targeting an audience is important

There are actually several reasons for this, but let's keep things simple and focus on two important topics: relevancy and budget.

For most of my small business clients getting started with marketing strategy, there's a relatively small budget we have to work with, and when this is the case, this severely limits how many potential new customers (or 'leads') we can reach with our marketing campaigns. The tactics that work for large multinational companies (think large billboards with catchy slogans) don't work for small businesses, because we can't reach the enormous amount of eyeballs that they can afford to.

But our strength as small business owners and marketers, when it comes to marketing, is our ability to be ultra-relevant and highly targeted in our approach. The effectiveness and impact of our marketing materials and advertisements are maximised when we target a narrow audience in this way, because we can ensure that a larger percentage of the limited number of people we can reach are highly interested in our marketing offer or message.

To use an analogy, for the same amount of money, we can select a wide audience, and be a drop in an ocean, or narrow our focus, and create a much bigger splash, albeit in a smaller pond.

How to select a target audience

To determine the ideal customer type for your business' first target audience, you’ll need to look for a single type of customer that best satisfies the below conditions simultaneously:

1. They are willing to pay fairly for your services.
2. They highly value what your business offers, especially the unique qualities that make you/your team different from the rest.
3. They motivate you/your team to serve them.

Whether you've worked with this customer type in the past, or they're a customer type you'd like to serve, it's important that there are enough of this customer type in your serviceable area to support your business long term, or you may need to add a second target audience to supplement later down the track.

Summary

Selecting a target audience is a critical first step on any small business' marketing journey, and doing so sets the stage for a host of other marketing techniques to be implemented into your business with greater efficiency and effectiveness.

Marketing becomes a lot more fun, meaningful and purposeful when you have a clear picture of who you're connecting with on the other end of the line, so if you haven't already, I encourage you to have a think about implementing this important technique into your business' existing marketing strategy.

For more detail on this technique you can check out my Marketing Strategy For Beginners guide, and if you'd like me to help you through the process of selecting your business’ target audience, you can book a time for my ‘Targeting Your Audience’ marketing workshop via Calendly here.