Hello, everyone. This is Alejandro Cremades, and today we’re going to be talking about
how to find your target audience. Before we get started, make sure that you hit that Subscribe
button, and this way, you will never miss out on any of the videos that we roll out
every week. Finding your customers, retaining them, being
there, making them loyal is everything. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking
it down for you and walking you through it step by step. So without further ado, let’s
get into it. You want to start by understanding: where
is your target audience? You are starting with a big vision for your business. You have
a big vision. You know how you’re going to be starting, just for an example, with
a store and then building it into what’s going to become a mall. But first, you need
to understand what that mall is going to be, what it’s going to look like, and then how
do you reverse engineer the process to where you are today? Most likely, the customers
that you’re going after today are going to change over the course of time until you’re
in the mall. In the mall, there are going to be all types of customers and different
types of personas. Think about it: when Tesla launched the first
model back in 2008, they were more expensive; they didn’t have the charging stations that
are now everywhere. Now they’re more affordable; now there are more people that can actually
purchase a Tesla. They have different ways to purchase a Tesla, financing methods to
purchase a Tesla. None of that was available back in 2008. So, obviously, the target audience
and that persona have changed over the course of time.
The same thing, for example, with Amazon—when Amazon started, they were selling books, but
they knew that they wanted to be the everything store. Now you can buy anything that you want
on Amazon. But, again, things have changed for Amazon, and that profile and audience
have also changed over the course of time. So you want to be very clear who is going
to be most likely to buy your stuff and be interested with your stuff today and then
have an idea as to how that is going to be shifting and transitioning over time as your
company matures. Why is the target audience so important? The
target audience is everything. Really understanding who you’re going after and having data that
validates who you’re going after is going to allow you to understand how you can make
a meaningful business. There is a great report that CB Insights,
which is a research company, came out with that they pointed out several factors that
triggered failure of a business and what some of those ingredients were that repeated over
the course of time over and over when startups failed. Based on the data and that research,
some of those factors were the following: No market need for their product
Running out of cash Not having the right team
Pricing Poor Products
Business models Poor Marketing
Ignoring Customers Poor Product Timing
Lack of focus As you see, not having the target audience
in place is going to be an incredible trigger. By knowing who you’re going after, you’re
going to ultimately risk the execution that you have in front of you for the next 18 to
24 months, which is what you want to do here. According to the same research from CB Insights,
over 42% of companies that failed did so because they brought a product to market where there
was no need. That’s why, more than anything, you want to be familiar with what that problem
is that your customers or your potential customers are experiencing. Again, if there’s no need
for your product or your service, nobody is going to buy it. So be very clear as to what
exactly is the gap in the market that you’re covering by bringing your product or your
service to market. Product/market fit is absolutely essential.
Product/market fit happens when your product or your service are flying off the shelves.
You can’t keep up with customer support or with people opening accounts. It’s just
skyrocketing, and that’s when you’ve really hit a nerve in the market. Some of the key
things that come into place here when determining the product/market fit and knowing the success
could be any of the following: Product Design
Delivery The Shopping Experience
Customer Care and After-Sales Pricing
Branding Who you bring onto your team to make all this
happen the right way If you find your target audience and you listen
to them, you’re going to be able to get to product/market fit. And if you want to
know whether or not you have product/market fit, it’s very simple: ask your customers,
“If you could no longer use our product or service, would you be 1) very disappointed,
2) a little bit disappointed, or 3) you wouldn’t care?
If you don’t get over 65% of people responding, they will be extremely disappointed, that
means you don’t have product/market fit, and you need to go back to the drawing board.
Again, over 65% of people would be extremely disappointed if they could no longer use your
product or service. Marketing: marketing is another one. When
you are able to nail it in the marketing, when you put $1 in and take $2 or $3 out.
You know your customer acquisition cost, your lifetime value, all of these different metrics
that make a big difference, that is going to give you even more data. It’s going to
help you understand: where are your customers? Where does the audience ultimately live?
As an example, if you are using apps on places like Facebook, it even breaks down for you:
what is the age? Are they female or male? Where do they live? Do they have a degree?
Do they have a Master’s degree? What is that, and what is their level of education?
They give you all that data so that you can spend on ads, and the more that you get to
optimize the people that you’re going to go after.
Really nailing it on the marketing, understanding your funnel, understanding who you’re going
after, and tweaking and iterating on that is ultimately going to allow you to achieve
perfection when it comes to nailing it on your target audience.
Knowing your target audience is also going to allow you to differentiate yourself from
competitors. Again, ask your customers who do they use and why? What do they like about
them? What don’t they like about them? Understanding some of the gaps that your competitors are
leaving and how you’re able to address your customers by giving them exactly what they’re
missing from other players is going to help you stand out from everyone else and to find
your Blue Ocean Strategy, which is where can you swim where nobody else is swimming?
You also want to know if your market is big enough. You want to get out there and see
how many people you can target. If your market is not $1 billion or more, most likely big
investors like venture capital firms are not going to want to even touch it because that
means that is going to limit the potential returns that investors are going to get, and
also, you should think about return on time. You should go after people and markets that
are big enough for you to do something great about it.
How do you find your target audience? What are some of those tactics that you could use?
You definitely should go online; you should research. There are probably great reports,
great studies that have been published. Some of those studies and reports may cost you
an arm and a leg, but there’s no need to invest a lot of money on this. You can actually
do some research and find some of those studies and some of those numbers that are published
on Google and publicly available to everyone, so there’s no need to spend a lot of money
here. But some of those reports and studies are
going to allow you to understand how big this is going to be, who you’re going after,
any data points that are going to help you understand who you are going after, how you
can market to them, how you can put yourself in front of them, and how you can ultimately
optimize the product and the service that you want to launch in the market.
Again, you want to do a lot of tests. You want to market out there. You want to put
together the landing page where you’re sending and driving traffic to it, and you can see
how people are reacting with it. You can actually put some plugins and some different tools
that you could use like Dropyard, to see what they think and how people are navigating through
your stuff. You can also use funnels. On the pixel that you install from Facebook, you
can see where they are in the funnel, where the drop off is, and how that onboarding works.
You can also use other tools like Kissmetrics, where you can see throughout the flow of onboarding,
purchasing, and retaining them how the customer is behaving. You want to be able to use that
because that’s going to help you in knowing whether that audience is the right one, or
perhaps there’s a different audience that you should be going after.
Your target audience is ultimately going to define the DNA of your business. Without a
doubt, it is critical to direct your advertising, your marketing, the input, and the output
that you’re able to get for all the hard work. So it’s all about working smart so
that you can get better results. So get out there and get your own customers.
Hopefully, you like this video. Hit a Like and leave a comment underneath and let me
know what you’re up to. And Subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss out on
all the videos that we’re rolling out every week. If you’re raising capital, send me
an email at alejandro@pantheraadvisors.com. I would love to help out with your fundraising
efforts. Thank you so much for watching.