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One thing that is absolutely crucial to a business’s long term success is the ability to reach a target demographic. This is a certain segment of consumers that have a specific background that a business believes could become their primary source of income for a particular product. If you fail at reaching these consumers, you will probably ultimately fail as a business. With this in mind, below are a few strategies you should deploy to reach your target audience.
Research the Market
Beyond testing your product, even more extensive market research is required. For example, while focus group participants may have been enthusiastic about your product, there may already be strong competition from other companies that would make entering that market unfeasible. Overall, there is a lot you need to uncover via market research regarding your target demographic that you will need to know to succeed. For example, you should be aware of the income level of your target audience and the amount of disposable income they have. If you don’t correctly price your product, you may not be able to sell any products at all let alone maximize your profits.
Choose the Right Platforms
Once you have settled on your target demographic and have the appropriate information regarding those consumers’ average backgrounds, you can begin choosing marketing strategies to reach them. One of the most important steps of this process is choosing the right platforms to utilize for advertisements and marketing campaigns.
Information on that target audience’s background will help determine the choices you utilize. For example, if your target demographic was 18 year olds with moderate family incomes, you would probably not print advertisements in newspapers or magazines those consumers would be very unlikely to purchase and read. Instead, you may notice that the age group spends a lot of time on their phones. In that case, using a short code to send SMS text messages to those consumers’ phones may be a much more successful strategy for reaching them.
When targeting an international audience consider using WhatsApp, an international communication app, and posting WhatsApp status video content to provide updates on your business with consumers.
Test Your Product
Before you settle on a demographic group to target with your marketing efforts, you must first determine exactly who that demographic should be. This can make a huge difference in regards to how a product is positioned in the market. Think, for example, of the difference between commercials aimed at teens and those aimed at seniors. The gap can be quite wide. Overall, you should try testing out your product with methods like focus groups, surveys and pilot programs to try to discover just who may be most interested in buying your product.
Utilize Influencers
The internet has completely changed the business landscape. Social media, in particular, is very important in regards to how many companies spread the word for their promotions, products and more. If your target demographic skews younger, you should certainly take advantage of this by enlisting social media and internet influencers to give your products some publicity. According to the Digital Marketing institute, 70 percent of teenagers prefer influencers to normal celebrities. It’s a cutting edge marketing strategy that can work. However, it only works for influencers that actually reach into your target demographic.
Create Custom Content Targeted at Your Audience
Content marketing is another excellent strategy to use to reach a specific market. This involves the creation of custom content that provides value to the consumer beyond simply advertising a product. Think, for example, if your company manufactured grocery store products like bread crumbs. A successful content marketing strategy would be to create blog articles and YouTube videos with recipes for dishes including your bread crumbs. These would specifically be targeted at parents and housewives looking for new recipes to cook for their families. The key is being able to attract consumers without them being aware that it is being used as a vehicle for advertising your product. In this regard, some restraint in regards to how you frame your product can go a lot further than being more overt about it like would be the case in a television commercial.
Conclusion for Reaching Your Business Target Audience
Overall, products can’t sell without customers. It is the job of a business to try to reach out to the consumers that are most likely to buy their products through marketing and other means. This requires learning who those customers should be by completing extensive research. It also means choosing the right marketing platforms to reach those consumers and considering adding newer digital marketing strategies such as influencer marketing and content marketing to your campaigns.
