The primary purpose of marketing is to create interest in a product or service. And through it, the goal is to acquire or retain customers through different strategies. However, you can’t expect every marketing method to work for everyone. You should target the best audience for your product or service to get the most out of your marketing.

To market to the best audience, consider the following: 

- Age and gender demographics

- Values and beliefs

- Your potential customer's pain points 

Determine the type of person looking for your product or service and who will most likely benefit from your business.

In this guide, we’ll go through how you can determine your ideal customer and provide marketing tips for each factor. 

Ways to Find Your Customer Avatar

The first step to targeting the best audience for your business is finding your customer avatar. This is a marketing term used to describe your ideal customer – who they are, what they look like, what they do, what they believe, and so on. By finding the type of person who uses your product or service, you can easily hook leads by appealing directly to them. 

Age and Gender

We all know the stereotype of people who love Starbucks: teenage girls and young women. Over the years, this has become a running joke. But, it gives us insight into how Starbucks markets its delicious coffee drinks and aesthetically-pleasing snacks. 

Look, we’re not saying to stereotype people for the sake of marketing! However, finding the demographics of the people who use your product or service helps you better target potential leads. 

One of the most fundamental ways to determine your audience is by identifying their age and gender. Think of what you’re offering: who is the person you picture most that most desires it? 

People love when they feel seen and acknowledged. So, the more specific your marketing is, the better. It’s important to remember that not all products and services will be age and gender-specific. The broader the market, the more comprehensive your targeting must be, which makes it more difficult. So, try narrowing it down as much as possible. 

Here’s an example: For a product such as a stair lift, the age and gender demographics are easy to determine. They’re primarily used by senior citizens, by more women than men. This means stair lifts are usually marketed toward women who are 65 and older. In this case, an effective marketing approach would include print ads in the newspaper instead of putting content out on TikTok – a platform where not many senior citizens hang out.

For products with a broader market (like bottled water or smartphones), a helpful approach would be to create multiple customer avatars and have an extensive campaign that appeals to each age and gender demographic.

Marketing Tip: You can easily research the age and gender demographics of users for each social media platform, which can be used to your advantage. For example, over 76% of Pinterest users are women. If you have a product geared more towards a female audience, try marketing on Pinterest to get more leads. 

In any form of marketing, you can better target your audience by age and gender, especially in digital marketing. This will help you find the best methods you market, saving you time and trouble. 

Values and Beliefs

Now more than ever, people are sharing their beliefs and opinions. Social media spreads ideas rapidly among users, and marketers are getting insight into what different people value. This is one of the critical aspects of identifying your target audience. 

The second most significant way to market to the best audience is to evaluate your ideal customer's values and belief systems and cater to them. This is another part of finding your customer avatar. Some things to consider are family values, political opinions, religious beliefs, and causes to support. 

If you’re selling reusable straws, you can easily identify that your audience is climate-conscious and cares about saving the environment. So, you can highlight their reusability and how they reduce the use of plastic overall. 

Or, let’s say you’re selling tote bags. While this product isn’t as obviously sustainable as the straws, you can pull environmentally-friendly attributes of the bag and amplify those features. Mentioning that they’re made with 100% recycled cotton will also appeal to the climate-conscious customer. 

Both examples show how you can appeal to your customer’s values in obvious and subtle ways. 

Marketing Tip: Identifying your customers’ values and belief systems allows you to target what’s important to them. This is great for using compelling language in your marketing because these topics usually have strong feelings attached to them. Family, religion, and passionate causes are something that people take very seriously. So, try to tie back your customer's values in your descriptions, copy, or any form of writing. And if you can, do so without explicitly stating it.

By targeting your audience’s beliefs, you can market your product to align with their values and convictions, which increases your chances of converting leads into customers.

The Pain Points

No one likes a Debby Downer. However, your ideal customer’s complaints significantly help with your marketing efforts because you can offer the solution by knowing what they dislike. This method requires you to get into your customer’s head.

Finding your customers' pain points is one of the best ways to market your product to the best audience. This allows you to get more specific on what you can offer. 

Here’s an example: You’re selling a product for babies – a new and improved infant swing. In this scenario, your target market would be mothers. Now that you’ve determined that, you must dig deeper to make your product stand out among the other swings. To do this, you have to identify the pain points mothers have. What are they complaining about? 

The common complaints you found from mothers included fussy infants that won’t calm down, inability to complete household tasks, and complicated products to set up. Luckily, your product solves all three of those problems. It’s easy to set up, calms infants down with its soothing noise machine, and allows the mother to free up her hands to multitask while caring for her child. Problem solved!

Marketing Tip: If you’re having difficulty identifying your customers’ pain points, you can do some super-sleuthing to find out what they are. To do this, first determine your customer avatar. Then, find and join Facebook groups that contain those exact types of people. Read their posts. What are they asking for advice or recommendations on? What are they complaining about? More importantly, what do they like or find helpful? Finding the answers to these questions is a guaranteed way to determine your target audience’s pain points. For the example we used above, you could join a local mother’s Facebook group and see what mothers in your area are experiencing. 

By determining the pain points, your marketing can reflect that your product or service solves your customer’s problem. 

Conclusion

Understanding your audience is the key to getting the right leads that turn into customers. After all, you can’t appeal to everyone! But guaranteed, there’s someone out there looking for the exact service or product you provide. By finding out your ideal customer type, you’ll be able to target all your marketing efforts better. Finding the best audience to market to means you’ll have higher chances of landing new clients. 

We hope you found this guide helpful. If you have any marketing questions or are interested in how we can help you, contact the experts at Reflex Brands.