Defining your Target audience is one of the most critical tasks while designing a marketing campaign. Whether your objective is to create awareness, drive consideration or generated leads and sales, this is the first step in the entire process. Because everything henceforth is dependent on who you are talking to about your product or service.
All human beings are different and have different perspectives ways of interpreting things. Do you talk to your parents, friends, manager, clients in the same tone? No, right? That's because each one of them display a different set of characteristics and hence the way you talk to them changes accordingly. That is why even for your brand it is important to identify your customers (Target Audience) and talk to them in the language they understand and relate to in order to persuade them to choose your brand.
One of the common mistakes a lot of businesses to do when asked to define their Target Audience is believing that "Everyone is my target audience".
When you target everyone, you do not target anyone.
When you define your Target Audience, think of that one person who's your ideal customer who will buy your product or service. It's called a "Pen Profile". Because once you define this, you will have absolute clarity of where to find them and how to communicate with them. So consider these 3 profiles when you define your audience:
Demographic Profile:
Basic details about a group. This is the first level of profile. Consider details such as age, gender, geography, ethnicity, education, source of income, socio-economic status, occupation etc.
Psychographic Profile:
Psychographic profile defines characteristics like attitudes, habits, beliefs, values, opinions, lifestyle, interests, aspirations etc. As a brand it is important align yourself with a certain set of these characteristics to build relevance of your brand with your audience.
Behavioural Profile:
Defining behavioural profile takes care of one's emotional characteristics. This is critical to know as this profiling gives you an understanding why a person behaves in a certain way. Based on this information you can identify the core human desires of your audience and align your brand to address them.
When you define a specific audience that you want to talk to, you end up understanding their pain points, likes, dislikes, preference and every other smaller yet critical details. This in turn makes you create your brand communication that's relevant to them and resonates with them. This eventually creates a unique position of your brand their mind and gives them a reason to choose your brand over your competition.
To summarise, to build a successful brand or a marketing campaign, defining your target audience profile is the first step. That is where it all begins from. Define this and work backwards. It's called "Consumer focussed marketing".