Defining the Target Audience for Your Finance Company
A target market comprises people with similar traits, like demographics and behaviours. You can start with general categories such as gender or education level and those who hold mortgages. Then, gradually narrow these categories to obtain a more specific picture of your target audience. The key lies in being as precise as you can when defining your target audience.
Knowing your ideal customer is vital for the success of any business. Moreover, it helps you avoid making broad, unclear statements in your marketing. As a result of these vague statements, you can drive customers away, possibly towards your competition.
Notably, the best approach is to focus on your target audience. In this blog post, we’ll explain the concept of a target audience in simple terms. We’ll discuss why it’s essential to your company’s marketing strategy. Plus, we’ll share tips on identifying and reaching these consumers within your marketing efforts.
What Is A Target Audience?
A target audience is a group defined by specific demographics and behaviour. More often than not, businesses use their knowledge about their target audience to develop user personas. These buyer personas guide their decisions on marketing plans and campaigns.
A fitting target audience could be “millennial homeowners.” Defining this audience is vital because more young people are buying homes now than before. As a result, this fact significantly influences the content and ads you create.
Many factors define your target audience:
- How old they are
- Their gender
- Where they live
- Income level
- Their education
- What they’re interested in
- And much more
However, before deciding, could you consider your current customer base and who you want your future clients to be?
You might discover surprising patterns. Many young people, for example, are exploring the world of finance. They’re using Robo-advice and investment apps more than ever, with an increased interest in wealth preservation.
Moreover, don’t just focus on the traditional image of “affluent middle-aged individuals with large savings.” Instead, could you consider younger age groups, different genders, various ethnicities, and various income levels?
Why Define Your Target Market
Marketing without a defined target market is like shooting in the dark. A broad and unfocused approach to marketing often leads to wasted resources with minimal returns. However, directing efforts towards the right audience, those most likely to purchase from you will yield significant marketing results.
A common cause of business failure is not defining a target market. More specifically, businesses that try to reach everyone without knowing their potential consumers. As a result, this approach weakens the overall brand message and leads to ineffective marketing campaigns and low sales.
Moreover, understanding a target market helps businesses create products or services that fulfil their consumer’s specific needs and desires. In short, companies must have this understanding to only offer services that appeal to a specific group of people. As a result, this situation can lead to low demand and, ultimately, business failure.
So, spending time and resources identifying a target market is critical to any business’s success. Doing so provides a clear direction for creating products, planning marketing strategies, and growing the business.
How To Find Your Target Audience
1. Learn From Your Current Customer Base
Your current customers are a wealth of knowledge. With this in mind, use surveys, focus groups, and data analysis to understand their traits.
Surveys
Could you invite your customers to take part in online surveys? Your surveys could offer incentives like entry into a prize draw. As a result, Surveys can help understand the demographics and behaviour of your customers.
But could you ensure that your surveys don’t invade people’s privacy intrusively so as not to damage your reputation? Post-purchase survey requests are often more effective than ones on website visits. With that in mind, many free survey tools like Zoho Survey, SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, and Google Forms are available.
Focus Groups
Talking to a group of customers can give you deeper insights. While surveys provide numbers, focus groups reveal the feelings and thoughts about your business. With that in mind, hiring an expert to arrange and lead these groups for valuable results is best.
Data Analysis
You likely have a lot of customer data already. If that’s the case, analyse this data to understand average age, location, spending habits, etc. As a result, use this information to group customers based on different criteria.
Online Analytics
Review data from your website and social media. Free tools like Google Analytics can provide valuable insights about your website visitors.
If your customers are primarily businesses, collect B2B data like business size, products and services sold, locations, etc. On the other hand, if your customers are consumers, collect B2C data like income, hobbies, age and location.
2. Review Your Competitors
Study your competitors’ marketing activities. As a result, this market research will help you understand who they’re targeting. With this in mind, look at their advertising activity, social media platforms, and created content.
In short, knowing who your competitors aim for within their marketing is essential. For this reason, understanding helps you decide to go after the same people or find a different group they’ve missed.
3. Create a Picture of Your Non-Customers
Financial advisors often target specific groups such as retirees, business owners, professionals, families, women, and other client segments. Identifying these target markets can involve creating a financial roadmap with key milestones.
If your business is new or has few customers, you must use other sources to find your target market. Start with competitor research, then use desk research, focus groups, and market surveys to refine your target market.
Desk Research
You can use public sources to understand your potential target market. For example, resources like the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Gov uk provide helpful information.
Demographic Data
Use surveys to get demographic information from potential customers. As a result, this will help you understand who you should be targeting with your marketing efforts.
4. Create Buyer Personas and Market Segments
You can use your research to create a persona of your target customer. With this in mind, could you include a picture and a summary describing them? Moreover, it provides information like income, location, age, and lifestyle.
Compare their data with national averages to find unique traits. As a result, this can guide your advertising and marketing messages. Also, list their goals and frustrations related to your industry.
5. Evaluate your product or service against the target market
List all the features of your product or services to understand how best to market to your target audience. For each feature, describe how it benefits your target market. If you can’t find a benefit, consider changing your offering to suit your target market’s needs better.
Drawbacks Of Not Defining Your Target Audience
Not having a target audience can be risky for the success of your marketing efforts. You may be inclined to adopt a broad approach, but it typically doesn’t yield success. With that in mind, you must aim your ads at the right audiences. Targeting your ads to those uninterested or unable to afford your firm may attract non-converting visitors.
Striving for increased website traffic is commendable, but it’s only beneficial if it translates into business. With conversion, these numbers hold more value.
Target Audience vs. Target Market
A target audience and a target market are not the same thing; they differ significantly. The target audience refers to a particular demographic, such as ‘mid-career professionals aged 35-50 seeking to invest for retirement.’. On the other hand, the target market is a broader segment that a company aims to engage with its offerings.
For example, a retirement planning firm like Fidelity Investments may target individuals aged 50+ planning for their future. Whereas PayPal, a digital payment platform, targets younger, tech-savvy users who often shop online or make digital transactions.
It’s important to note that the alignment with the target market is sometimes vague. For instance, some young professionals may need retirement planning advice from early career success or inheritance.
Similarly, some older individuals might use digital payment solutions like PayPal for convenience or to stay updated with technology. However, the primary goal is to pinpoint the critical attributes of the demographic you aim to cater to.
How to Identify the Target Audience for a Finance Company
1. Conduct Thorough Research
Start by outlining a good grasp of your business and its industry niche. Analyse your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). This analysis will help you understand where your business stands.
Next, study the different factors that have an impact on your business. These could include demographics, market trends, and competition. Each of these factors can influence your business in different ways.
Google Analytics is a great tool to help you with this analysis. This tool provides valuable information about the people who visit your website. For example, it informs you of the location of your visitors and how they interact with your website. This information can give you insights into your audience and help you make informed decisions about your business.
2. Understand Your Client’s Needs And Wants
First, comprehend the specific issues or pain points your product and services solve for your clients. Think about their concerns and how your product can offer a solution. For example, the current economic climate is causing a lot of stress for many people about their financial situation. If you think about this, you can present your brand as a potential solution.
Next, develop ideal character profiles, or client personas, of your perfect client. You can better customise your content and communication strategy by creating these personas. Tailoring your messaging this way makes it more effective and relevant to your target audience.
3. Study your competitors
Start by examining your competitors’ strategies. Identify what strategies are effective for them and which ones aren’t.
You can use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to help you with this task. These tools allow you to see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. Use this information to guide the creation of your content.
Additionally, keep an eye on your competitors’ backlinks and rankings. Doing so will provide you with more insights into their performance and tactics.
4. Check and adjust regularly
You may need to revise your first marketing plan. It’s essential to keep reviewing and tweaking it. You may need to target the right age demographic, or a blog post you thought would attract visitors receives little traffic.
It’s essential to monitor your strategies regularly. Monitoring helps you determine what is effective and what isn’t. Tools like Google Analytics and SEMRush can help you track these performances.
If your marketing strategy isn’t yielding the desired results, it’s time to revise it. Conversely, if a method is successful, analyse why it works so you can repeat its success in the future.
To sum it up, drawing in your ideal audience requires several steps. It would be best if you did research first.
Next, understand your customers’ needs and study your competitors’ actions. Lastly, revise and update your strategies based on your findings regularly.
The Bottom Line
In short, knowing who your customers are is vital for a good marketing strategy. This involves researching and understanding what your customers want. It would be best to watch what your rivals are up to with their marketing efforts. Regular updates to your plan, based on what you learn, will keep it relevant and effective.
As you get to know your audience better, your marketing will become more focused efficient, and yield better results. The key takeaway is this: understand your audience, meet their needs, and remain flexible to keep them interested.
About Goldmine Media
Goldmine Media is a renowned, all-in-one financial services marketing agency. We’ve worked closely with driven clients for over twenty years to achieve their goals.
Our services include:
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As a company, we proudly partner with various clients, from major corporations to small and medium financial firms. These partnerships span across the globe, from the UK and abroad. So, be it the UK, USA, UAE, or Singapore, our team is always ready to meet your marketing goals.
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