bouchetadrianss: Finding your target audience: A dozen people can help you succeed ...

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By Dixie Laite

First, let?s get this straight: You are not Coke.

Coca-Cola needs millions of people to know about and drink their soda in order to be successful. Their brand?s target audience are men, women, and children at every income level, who have drunk soda in the past and will likely do so again. In other words, their target audience is?I think the technical marketing term is??just about everybody.?

15-minutes-of-dame-by-dixie-laite That?s not you. Your target audience is not just about everybody. (And if you think it is, you are wrong.)

You want to think about your target audience. In social media, who is most likely to want to consume your content? In the world we live in, who is most likely to want your product or service?

At a recent speaking engagement, I met a woman who wanted to market her pet photography business. When I asked her to describe her target audience she said, ?Everyone.? I told her to narrow it, and she said, ?Everyone with a pet.? But when I asked her to think more critically about who was most likely to want to spend hundreds of dollars on a photograph of his or her pet, she conceded that the category was narrower. In fact, people with certain income levels, certain lifestyles and certain feelings about the role their pet plays in their life are more likely to use her services than others.

In the same way, you need to think critically and analyze the people who make up your target audience. Think in terms of demographics: their age, race, income, location, occupation, political affiliation, social status, education, and family life. Also, think in terms of psychographics: interests, sensibilities, hobbies, aesthetics, sexuality, and their perspectives, fears, hopes and dreams.

You might try writing this all down. Work up some profiles of the types of customers you can likely attract. Give them names, ages, and add details that will help you visualize them. Here?s an example:

Let?s say I want to build a site called The Lost Art of Being a Dame. The site will explore how women from the past can inspire women today in becoming their best?their smartest, strongest, sassiest, sexiest?selves. My audience profile might look like this:

Women 18?65, interested in popular culture and human potential topics. They enjoy learning about the past, not living in it. Playful with a serious side, they see no paradox in exploring both style and substance simultaneously. They see no dichotomy in being a feminist and an unabashed lipstick connoisseur; thoroughly enjoying and analytically scrutinizing even the most mundane pop culture details; and in being cool and cynical and being unable to resist the latest self-help tome.

Then I would get more specific by identifying narrower potential audience segments:

VINTAGE VIXENS: Tattooed Millennials who aspire to look like Bettie Page, wear vintage clothes or reproductions and profess a love of Turner Classic Movies.
FOXY FEMINISTAS: Women 25?45 who pored over issues of Sassy before graduating to Bust Magazine. Smart college-educated readers who unabashedly admit the Real Housewives and US Weekly as guilty pleasures.
MENOPAUSAL MAVENS: Women 45?65 trying to figure out or re-define what middle-aged means in the 21st century. They take martial arts classes, subscribe to More magazine and are a wee bit addicted to net-a-porter.
CULTURE CURATORS: Old movie aficionados, pop culture purists, performers, designers, stylists and others who have an insatiable interest in the first half of the 20th century.
SELF-HELP SEEKERS: Women of all ages interested in new ways to explore human potential, self-development, self-improvement and spirituality. They read Oprah, they?ve read The Secret, and they know their way around an affirmation.

I would want to keep these women, my target audience, in mind when I strategize, create content or market my wares.

We live in a world overflowing with content and products and services. If you try to target the masses, you can?t. There are too many of them, and they have too many choices. You will get lost or ignored.

As Seth Godin says, ?You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They?re not anonymous and they?re not masses.? If you are starting out, your goal isn?t to create content for 100,000 people. Your goal, initially, is to engage about 20 people?the right people.

Traditional ?cast a wide net??type marketing just doesn?t work like it once did. Why? ?In part because there?s so much of it, in part because people have learned to ignore it, in part because the rise of the Internet means that companies can go beyond it,? explains William C. Taylor, Fast Company?s founding editor.

Mr. Godin goes as far to say that first you need to find just 10 people??10 people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you.? These ten people, says Seth, exemplify your target audience:

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they?ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

He advises that entrepreneurs plan not on a big splashy (and expensive) launch, but rather on a gradual build. In other words, stop thinking in terms of Coke and Super Bowl ads. Stop thinking about wide nets, hundreds of ?Likes,? and thousands of Twitter followers.

Don?t obsess about numbers and size and splash. Obsess about the only things you should obsess about: Really serving the people you really can serve.

This is the 16th episode of ?15 Minutes of Dame,? a column published every other Tuesday to help you create, develop and promote the living crap out of your brand. Dixie Laite has been putting the ?broad? in broadcasting for over 20 years, working in television, online, print and marketing for a variety of major media brands. Currently Senior Editorial Director at MTV Networks? TeenNick, she also freelances as a writer, digital content strategist and speaker. Check out her new blog,?The Lost Art of Being a Dame.?Follow Dixie?@DameStyle?and?Pinterest.?Dixie really wants to hear from you?please post your comments below!

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