Effective communication starts by knowing your target audience

Marketing Tips Week - Tip no 5
What will be read can be dictated
By where your reader is located

This simple rhyme serves as a reminder to clearly understand your potential customer - and by location we are talking about background and mindset as well as geographic place!

Here's how marketing companies categorise potential markets:

1. Demographic information — this may include information like age, sex, nationality, marital status and income for consumers and sector, no of employees and turnover for corporates

2. Psychographic information — this includes lifestyle data like hobbies, interests, opinions, entertainment etc for consumers and for corporates whether they are start ups; market leaders; environmentally astute, early adopters, staunchly traditionalist etc.

3. Geographic information — where are they based? This can be as broad as the country in which they live, or as narrow as the county, city, neighbourhood or business park.

4. Behavioural information — which social networks and other websites do they frequent most? Where do they physically go? Which TV and radio stations do they tune into? Which magazines do they read, which trade papers do they follow, do they attend trade forums, business exhibitions or membership organisations?

5. Motivational Information - how is your product or service going to add value to their lives? According to whether your target audience are consumers or corporates this is about asking yourself questions like:

• Is your product something they need or something they want?
• Does it make them feel better about themselves?
• Does it add value to their own business offering?
• Will it differentiate them from their competitors?

6. Purchasing Information

• If they are corporates can they apply for funding, or is there help you can offer with purchasing like subscription or leasing arrangements?
• Where do they shop? Online or in person?
• Is there a seasonality to the buying pattern for this particular product or service?

7. Benefit information — how exactly will your target audience benefit from your product or service? This is often about understanding their challenges and how you solve them. For corporates this is usually around one of three things: to increase revenue, to maintain the status quo, or to decrease expenses.

I hope you have enjoyed marketing tips week. Normally the pace is a little more sedate with pearls of wisdom being posted about once a week. Why not follow my blog so that you receive these automatically? And please forward the link to anyone else you think might enjoy the advice. Thank you!