Are you ready for the understatement of the century?
The internet is…wait for it…..BIG!
And on that big ol’ internet, are a ton of people.
There are 7.8 Billion people in the world. 4.57 Billion of them exist online in some capacity.(source)
Point being, there is a massive potential audience that exists online and you can’t possibly reach all of them. Nor do you want too.
Regardless of the marketing exercise; be it sales driven, brand building or community engagement, identifying a target audience is a vital component of any effort and should be explored in the early days of any plan.
So what of it? Well, when you really hone in on your target market and deliver a message that resonates, you’ll feel it. You’ll feel it in your marketing analytics, your sales numbers and in the excitement you’re experiencing that comes with growth and progress.
That’s why it’s important to develop that target persona early; the influence will permeate the fabric of everything you do moving forward and ultimately influence your success as much as any other factors.
Let’s say for argument’s sake you skip that step and take the “everyone’s my market” approach.
Here’s a prime example of how that will kill your momentum before you even get going:
- I’ve got a product that’s ready to sell. It’s this really cool device that makes lunch and does chores. It connects into a console so I can control it while streaming on twitch and playing Fornite. Great! I’m going to sell it to 4.57 billion people. Awesome!
- Let’s fire up some facebook ads to get those sales rocking. Woah, turns out I don’t have the budget for 4.57 billion people. Let’s start with North America. Except, I’m not Apple or Nike, so let’s start with 10% of that.
- My ads are running for a week and I haven’t gotten any sales. Weird.
- I’ll dig into social analytics and see what’s up. Holy! Turns out my 75% of my ad placements were hitting 55+ males, completely missing suburban markets and what’s all of this traffic doing coming from Moosejaw?
- Now that I think about it, what am I even doing on Facebook in the first place? This is a product for gamers!
The thing is, this happens a lot. And it’s completely avoidable.
The best thing about digital is that’s very possible to hone in on your target audience and know that you’re hitting it. The stats will be there to dictate your success. And if you miss, it’s all learning and you make the appropriate adjustments to keep refining your process until you get it dialed in. Your budgets will thank you.
If you need a hand defining your audience, you’ve come to the right blog.
