Learning Your Audience

When learning to market yourself you should start with the important question of who your audience is. In order to do this you need to consider the following: who is interested in your product or service?

Your audience is a generalized group of people that would likely be interested in what you are providing. You want to generalize according to gender, age, income, interests, location, and sometimes more factors.

 

Gender

This is more complex by the day and is obsolete in some areas depending on the environment that you live in. However, mostly this is determined by men or women. If you are advertising for something creative, for kids, for comfort, or anything specifically made for females then you want to advertise to women. If you are advertising for something construction, tools, or made specifically for males then you want to advertise to men. If it could apply to both male and female then you will need to have both in your audience. Be sure to be courteous and aware of the audience members that this applies to in your market.

 

Age

Consider age groups to be groups of under 20, 20-30, 30-40, 50-60, and 70+. If your product or service specifically to a age group then be sure to add this factor into your audience group. Also you this to be a big factor on how and where you advertise to your audience.

 

Income

The biggest part of this section is to consider that typically those in a lower income you do not want to spend money marketing to because they simply do not have the extra cash to spend on anything but necessities. This also can go hand in hand with the price of your product or service. The more expensive, the more “extra cash” your audience needs to have to purchase. Be sure to keep this balanced with the cost of the marketing to this audience and the location. The exception of this is if you are a nonprofit advertising to help those in the lower income class.

 

Location

Does your product or service have a specific area you want to advertise to? Most locations are going to be according to where you can sell or item or perform your service. For example if you have a home base for your business and can travel a certain distance OR if you can only sell within the your local area. This goes hand in hand with your income factor as well.

 

There are other factors, but these seem to be the major ones. Determining the answer to these helps you chose exactly who your audience is. This information helps you advertise and interact on social media platforms and other advertising elements.