Not everyone is your customer, and how to find your customer.
I learned this the hard way when I started my food delivery business back in 2016. I thought that my target audience was anyone who ate out. And I went ahead to target everyone, those that worked in banks, students, people that worked in offices, business owners, civil servants absolutely every and anyone. This was the first mistake I made, certainly wasn’t the last. I would have avoided all of that if I understood the difference between the two terms:
Market
Target audience
I will define these terms loosely and in a way, I think that makes intuitive sense, so just stay with me.
Market
This is the general group of people who want what you offer or an alternative, for example, my market for my food delivery would be people who ate out. So anyone who doesn’t for any reason eat out is not in my market.
Target market
This is a group of people who due to their demography (age, gender), geography (location), and psychograph (lifestyle) are better suited to benefit optimally from the solution that you provide.
A target market is developed when you decide and tailor your efforts on serving a part of the market as opposed to trying to serve all of the market.
Because you understand who your customers are you are able to serve them exactly how they want and improve your customer satisfaction rate. You also can concentrate your marketing efforts to attract more of such customers thereby increasing your revenue.
Now how do you develop a target audience?
By looking at your customer list
Look at people you already serve
Look at your product or service, list out the features and draw out the benefits
Who do you think needs your product most? Why?
Look at your competitors, what are they doing? What are you doing differently, then niche in on people that may not be targeted by them and need the service target them
Your target audience is a dynamic document. As your business grows and your product/service offering grows or as you discover that your assumptions about your market were wrong, your target audience will develop until you are serving exactly the segment of the market that needs your product the most
