Choosing the right target demographic can be a challenging decision, but it’s an important one.
If you’re going to plan a marketing strategy, you first need a solid target demographic. Hopefully, if your business has existed for a while, you have your target demographic nailed down. But if you’re working on a new startup or if you’re changing things up at your business, you may need to select a new demographic from scratch.
How can you tell which demographic is right for your new business?
Ideation
First, you’ll need to brainstorm some ideas of potential demographics. You can look at existing businesses like yours (i.e., competitors) to see which demographics they’re currently targeting, or use your own intuitions to think about who might be most interested in your products or services. Think about age, education level, gender, location, family status, and budget, among other factors.
The Research Phase
Once you have a few potential demographics, you’ll need to get your hands dirty with research. You can use Census information from the government to get hard facts about your demographic, including where they’re located and how they make purchasing decisions, but you’ll also need to conduct some surveys. If you have prototypes of your products or early offerings of your services, you’ll want to test them out with the crowd. Don’t be surprised or discouraged if your demographics aren’t as interested as you thought they’d be; there’s always time to change direction.
Developing Customer Personas
After determining which demographics will be best for your business, you’ll need to start working on customer personas—hypothetical models of what your “ideal” customers might look like. You can use these in all your future marketing and advertising brainstorming sessions, and refine them as you get to know those demographics better.
If you need help solidifying your branding or marketing approach, or if you’re ready to develop a customer persona, contact Quez Media today!
