How to define a target audience?
Hey all,
The common advice for founders is to define a very precise target audience. It helps figuring out how to talk to them, but also where to find them. For some of the products I'm working on it's totally obvious. For instance one of them is a platform for dog training. Obviously the target is dog owners. And I know I can decide to dig deeper, for instance new owners, or even new owners of a specific breed who want to work on say, recall.
However, other times, I don't find it that obvious. I've shared about another product I'm working on, which is a newsletter that teaches practical online privacy. This is what I know about my audience:
- they're not privacy advocates
- they're at the intersection of the 84% of people who say they care about their online privacy, and the 81% who say they feel like they have little to no control over it
- they don't need technical skills, but having some internet-savviness is helpful
- I'm kind of the target
This above doesn't help me much figure out who they are, and where to find them. At this stage of definition it still sounds like "everyone" is the target, which is not good.
So my question: how can I go about defining and refining my target audience?
Cheers,
it might be a bad offer/target
don't make it cause you think they need it
does anyone of them WANT it badly?
"build something people want"
it also has to be a group that you can easily gain access to
IDK, I could think about maybe parents to kids before they give them access to the internet with phone/computer maybe wanting yo know more so they can teach or protect their kids.
but just because you think a group needs it or should want it, doesn't mean they do
you can always make a claim everyone should know how to cook for themselves, play an instrument, change oil on their car, paint their home and 10,000 other different things
but it doesn't mean they want to
Targeting anti groups is problematic - the ones who aren't/don't X
people say the care and say yes to way more things than they would take action on - most would say they wants to be a good person, 87% of drivers say they are above average, yes I want to save the env. doesn't mean I'm going to take 1 extra step for it.
What I'm saying is that 84%-81% gap doesn't mean if there is a market of people ready to take any action on it.
Thank you for sharing. That's a valid argument; "if you can't define the audience, maybe there's no market". I have it pretty much ready so I'll probably still release it. I'm hoping this will help me find a real frustration that needs to be solved, and then the target audience should be easily derived from it.