When it’s Time to Redefine Your Target Audience

Having a clearly defined target audience is a crucial element of your overall business strategy, but sometimes, it takes a while to successfully identify the people who’ll appreciate your offerings most. Through the defining and testing process of building your audience, you might find that you’re off target and missing out on a significant amount of potential sales. But, there’s hope yet!

From dwindling engagement on your social media posts, to an influx of new customers that don’t fit your pre-defined persona, here are some tips for identifying when it’s time to redefine your target audience—plus a breakdown of how to do it.

On Target: What is a Target Audience?

Whether you’re new to running a business, or have years of experience, you might still be unfamiliar with the marketing term known as your “target audience.” Essentially, this is the group of people who best reflect the “ideal” customer of your business: the ones who are most likely to be interested in, engaged with, and frequent purchasers of your product or service.

The biggest business reason it’s so important to continually refine your target audience is so that you can get the maximum return on your marketing and advertising efforts. On the side of the customer, there is a sense of comfort and loyalty that comes from feeling confident in a company’s ability to “understand” your desires and interests.

Ready, Aim, Define Your Target Audience 

Some of the key demographic identifiers that are used when creating a target audience for your business are:

• age range, which can be as narrow as a few years or as broad as a span of multiple generations

• location, whether that’s a radius around your storefront or proximity to places where your products or services are most likely to be utilized

• sex and gender identity, and marital or family status

• income and education level, and/or occupation 

• ethnic background

In addition to demographic factors, other considerations should take into account psychographic factors (such as lifestyle decisions made, hobbies explored, and opinions held) and behavioral factors within your own business (such as repurchase rate).

Being as specific as possible helps you to really understand who you’re trying to reach with your products or services, and to better articulate how your offerings can improve the lives of this audience.

For example, a university that has a post-baccalaureate certificate program in criminal justice might see that their courses are particularly beneficial to those in law enforcement careers. They may choose to identify one of their target audiences as specifically as: 

• Young male police officers who hold a bachelor’s degree and make less than $65,000 per year and are interested in expanding their education and improving their chances to increase their rank in the field.

Depending on your offerings, you might find that you have multiple distinct audiences that your business will resonate with. That’s wonderful, but keep in mind you might consider segmenting these audiences and creating offers that speak to each group separately to build the healthiest relationships with them.

How to Tell if It’s Time to Redefine

1. You’ve never defined your target audience in the first place.

If you haven’t pinned down your target audience yet, it’s incredibly important to invest the time to do so. This will help you optimize your advertising spend and build better relationships with returning, new, and future customers.

2. You’re seeing a sudden shift in the performance of your advertising.

If you have been running ads successfully (whether digitally, as direct mail, out of home, or otherwise) for an extended period of time, and interest has suddenly dwindled, it’s possible the ads are becoming stale—or that you’re no longer resonating with your original audience. If you switch up the content and it’s still not hitting the mark, this could be a sign it’s time to reevaluate who you’re trying to reach.

3. You’ve noticed more and more new customers coming in that differ from your original target.

It’s not uncommon for a company to define who they think their target audience is, only to be surprised after a completely different type of customer starts making frequent purchases! This is good news because it means that your target audience has just self-identified for you. Pay attention to your sales trends and the demographics of your “star” customers; the ultimate goal is to find as many people like them as possible.

4. Your social media engagement has been dropping sharply on one platform, but not others.

Could this be related to your overall social strategy? Yes. However, this could also reflect a needed shift in which channels you focus on, and in turn, how you define your audience and their psychographics.

5. It’s been more than a year since you’ve audited your target audience.

Even if your products or services could be considered timeless, it’s likely that those who utilize them do so for a limited time. If you haven’t taken a look at who’s most enjoying your offerings most in several months, even if your sales have not changed, it’s still worthwhile to do an audit. This way, you can get ahead of potential shifting trends before they are beyond your ability to redefine your audience to meet them.

Sometimes You Simply Need to Refine

Just because you’re seeing a dip in sales over time doesn’t necessarily mean you need to completely redefine who you’re trying to reach through your messaging. Sometimes, other factors may be influencing your business that have nothing to do with your targeting efforts, so it’s important to continuously research the market as well as your competitors to establish whether there might be external challenges (like temporary inflation, laws allowing easier access to certain products, or a new launch from a competitor) you should consider, instead.

If this is the case, you might only need to make slight adjustments to your target audience, such as expanding the age range or geographic radius of the people you’re trying to engage. Don’t underestimate the power of a small shift!

Don’t Sweat Being Slightly Off-Target

It can take several iterations, and a good amount of patience, to finally pin down the target audience for your business. There’s no reason to be concerned or embarrassed about this! After all, you can’t be sure whether you’ve successfully identified your target audience until you’ve given yourself time to test the performance of your efforts to reach them.

If you’re looking for support with defining (or redefining) your business’s target audience, the team at Doukas Media is here to help. Contact us today to start the conversation.