Why do you need to define your target audience?
There are roughly 8 billion people in the world. Most businesses don’t care about 7.99999 billion of these people; the businesses only care about 0.00001 billion (or fewer) people who will buy or recommend the business’ product or service.
Your content (or proposal) needs to resonate with these people. The others don’t matter.
Before creating content, you should define your target audience. While there are a variety of ways to do this, the important part is to do it. Then you can fine-tune your message to address that audience.
Additional information on target audience
Here is a sampling of what John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket has written on the topic of target audience.
(12/30/2022) Bredemarket’s Two Step Target Segment (Persona) Definition Process
As professional marketers will tell you, using a real person rather than a constructed persona to define your target audience (or target segment) is an absolutely terrible thing to do.
But be terrible.
For some of you, I recommend that you consider using a real person as a starting point.
Large multi-million dollar businesses can devote the resources to the surveys, interviews, analytics, and other steps necessary for thorough persona creation.
But what if you’re a small business and don’t have the time or resources to do all that?
Don’t tell anyone, but you can cheat.
More at https://bredemarket.com/2022/12/30/bredemarkets-two-step-target-segment-persona-definition-process/
(10/30/2022) Six questions your content creator should ask you
- If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing for kids who buy lollipops in convenience stores, you’ll write one way.
- If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing to the convenience stores who could carry your lollipops, you’ll write another way.
Now sometimes content creators get fancy and create personas and all that (Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit), but the essential thing is that you understand who you want to read your content.
More at https://bredemarket.com/2022/10/30/six-questions-your-content-creator-should-ask-you/
(5/11/2021) Communicating benefits (not features) to identity customers (Part 2 of 3)
If I am going to sell an ABIS to the city of Ontario, California (sorry Thales), these are the types of customers (or target audiences) that I have to cover with separate benefit statements:
- The field investigators who run across biometric evidence at the scene of a crime, such as a knife with a fingerprint on it or a video feed showing someone breaking into a liquor store.
- The examiners who look at crime scene evidence and use it to identify individuals.
- The people who capture biometrics from arrested individuals at livescan stations.
- The information technologies (IT) people who are responsible for ensuring that Ontario, California’s biometric data is sent to San Bernardino County, the state of California, perhaps other systems such as the Western Identification Network, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- The purchasing agent who has to make sure that all of Ontario’s purchases comply with purchasing laws and regulations.
- The privacy advocate who needs to ensure that the biometric data complies with state and national privacy laws.
- The mayor (Paul Leon as I write this), who has to deal with angry citizens asking why their catalytic converters are being stolen from their vehicles, and demanding to know what the mayor is doing about it.
- Probably a dozen other stakeholders that I haven’t talked about yet, but who are influenced by the city’s purchasing decision.
Bredemarket 