Target customers: why our Marketing becomes so much better when we have a clear picture of them
- duboislukas
- Nov 25, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 27, 2024
You need to be clear about your target customers in order to address them successfully. Sounds super obvious but is often either ignored or completely over-engineered. I find this to be one of the biggest barriers for many businesses to grow and flourish. Because if done in a simple and pragmatic way, a clear target customer understanding will guide you to make big, impactful changes in how you design your product or service and your whole Marketing approach. This article helps you with that.
In my articles I purposefully want to bring some simple sense to over-complicated Marketing topics. Target groups is definitely one of them. You could also say target audiences or customer segmentation or customer profiles or personas, or, or, or. You already see how complicated it already gets with just the terminology. Especially big companies tend to over-engineer this topic incredibly. Research institutes produce super complex segmentation studies with fancy segment names and quantitative data in charts. Frankly, it’s quite easy to get lost here.
Which is a pity, because as you might have picked up in some of my articles, I really also believe you cannot do any sensible Marketing or business without clarity on your target customers. The fact that you need to address someone with your offering & Marketing might be so obvious that you do it somewhat unconsciously. Of course, you need to have someone in mind who would like your product or service. However, not making this an explicit exercise of clear choices is very dangerous. Creating a product or a service for pretty much anyone hardly leads to anything special.
You cannot do any sensible Marketing or business without clarity on your target customers. Creating a product or a service for pretty much anyone hardly leads to anything special.
I have written before about improving your customers’ experiences with your products or services or during their search & purchase phases. In order to come up with really surprising, meaningful and memorable experiences, you have to know who you are designing them for. You need to have a target customer in mind. We have seen how the best ideas differ a lot depending on who you are addressing.
How to get a target customer that works for you
Let’s make this as simple as possible. Especially if you are a smaller company, you need a hands-on, pragmatic approach. When you choose target customers in such a simple way, it becomes actionable and really impactful.
In a nutshell: you need to find distinguishing characteristics of customers in your industry that actually help you to address a customer group in a targeted way - with your product or service offering and with your marketing activities.
It is about finding those aspects of customers that really make a difference for your product or service offer – the “Game-Changers”.
Below is a checklist of characteristics for you to go through.
Now this is important: you should not describe every aspect below for your target group. It is about finding those aspects that really make a difference for your product or service offer. I call them “Game-Changer”. Only those should describe your target group, leave the rest out. Please also describe the “Game-Changer” aspects as narrowly as you can. This way your target customer becomes much more focused and better to work with.
Main characteristics:
(Relevant for both product/service offering AND Marketing)
User Types in your product/service category | Often very obvious differences in user types for your product or service. |
Age | Teenager? Young girls/boys? Young parents? Seniors/Pensioners? Etc. |
Gender | Male or female? |
Income | Low, mid, high? |
Family & Living Situation | Living alone? As a Couple? With Kids? City? Countryside? New in town? New in country? |
Geography | Neighborhood? Local? National? International? |
Interests/ Hobbies/ Passions | Many options here, but huge potential to identify interest communities with some link to your product & service category. |
Additional Marketing characteristics:
(Relevant only for Awareness, Search & Purchase. Treat those separately, as they do not have any impact on your product or service design.)
Media Consumption | TV? SocialMedia? Which channels specifically? What do they read/watch in relation to the above interests/hobbies/passions? |
Shopping Behavior | Online shopping? SocialMedia research? Highstreet window shopping? TV-shopping? Store visits? |
Example
Here are different examples of potential target customer groups for our fictive “Coffee & Things” place and how the offering and the Marketing approach would differ:
“Game-Changer” Age / Family&Living Situation: Mothers with small kids Children-friendly interior, drinks and snacks for kids, playcorner, kids books & toys to use while there and to purchase, getting into parent communities, inviting mother-influencers, hosting kids events at neighborhood festivals, etc.
“Game-Changer” Interest/Hobby/Passion: Artists Art-related interior/decoration, more extravagant menu, hosting exhibitions, appearing in artists magazines, newsletters or forums, engaging in arts events, etc.
“Game-Changer” Age: Seniors/pensioners You get the point, the coffee place would be different again and so would be the Marketing for it. “Game-Changer” Geography: Obviously in the case of a single coffee place, your location will be a Game-Changer. Either you have a location already, which will determine to a large extend who your target group should be, because of who lives/comes to this area. Or the other way around: your choice of another “Game-Changer” element for your target group determines the location you should select for your coffee place.
You see how a clear focus on a target group makes a huge difference. If you don’t make a conscious decision here, instead trying to please as many people as possible, you won't be especially appealing to anyone. There is also a big opportunity for you to identify a customer group that is currently not served well by others in your industry or in your geographic area. It might be a smaller group of people, but typically it's better to offer something that is truly great for a few than something that doesn’t really impress anyone at all. If you can WOW people, there is always room for growth.
It's better to offer something that is truly great for a few than something that doesn’t really impress anyone at all.
It's never too late
I know, real life is messy. You might say: “Great, I have been running my business for years. It’s too late now to do this nice target group exercise.” But it is never to late to improve your offering or your Marketing. In fact, it should be an ongoing process for every business. This is never complete. And doing this based on a refreshed picture of your target customers is a great start. Again, read my previous articles about how to go about it! What is more, the most promising target groups are often only revealed after some time. Pay close attention to what kind of people like your product or service offering most. Try to find out what they have in common, formulate a target group out of that to address them even better with your offering and your Marketing.
Can we not have several target groups?
To close this article, I want to discuss the question of several target groups:
Because this is what typically happens in reality. You come up with several interesting target groups. You see potential in different customer groups, opinions in your team might differ as well.
In principle, I am warning you to dilute or contradict your offering & marketing approach across different target groups, especially when they differ in the “Game-Changer” aspects. You quickly get to the point again of wanting to be everything for everyone and addressing as many people as possible with your Marketing. But that comes close to not having a target group at all.
That being said, it is indeed possible to have several target groups under one of two conditions:
If they don’t differ in the “Game-Changer” aspects, you can think of SUB target groups. They still share common aspects in the “Game-Changers”, so your product or service offering can stay the same for them. But on less relevant aspects you can build sub target groups to address differently with your Marketing. Of course, this counts for the above shown Marketing-only characteristics, but also for Non-“Game-Changer” characteristics from the main list. > For our coffee place example: if your “Game-Changers” are family & age and you address young parents with small children with your coffee place, you cannot at the same time target older singles. You would simply need a different coffee place for that. But you can address different types of young parents, for example based on different interests/hobbies/passions. It could lead to several distinct marketing activities.
If you are big enough to actually offer different products or services to very different target groups. >Our fictive example of “Nature Toys” could offer a range of toys for small children, say aged 1-6, and another range of toys for older children, say age 8-12. This would obviously result in very different products for each target group. But to be clear, then we also talk about managing two separate businesses. Not only do you need to develop two different product ranges, but also two different Marketing approaches. You would need at least a different product line name (brand). And basically, everything we have said above about the need for a clear target customer holds true again for each of these business fields.
I hope this worked and I brought more clarity and a pragmatic approach for working with target customers to your business. Again, there is no way to do business without customers in mind, so you better do it in a conscious way that truly makes a difference to your business & Marketing.
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