At the most simplistic level, marketing is the activity, which connects your organisations ‘offering’ with the target audience(s). Marketing is therefore the key ‘enabler’ to growing your business and achieving success. The principles of marketing are commonly understood around the following core ‘components of marketing’:
- The offering: the products (e.g. ethically sourced clothing) or services (e.g. counselling) your organisation will offer.
- The value proposition: Articulating your offering to the target audience- ‘the solution to their needs’.
- The marketing strategy: Your strategy for connecting with the target audience (e.g. deciding to target a specific geographical audience).
- The marketing plan: The objectives, budgets and tools that will be used to deliver the marketing strategy.
- The target audience: The stakeholders who will be ‘sold’ your value proposition.
Underpinning all of these marketing pillars must be comprehensive understanding of the target audience (e.g. who they are, where they are, what are their needs and their typical characteristics). The relationship between these different components is illustrated in the diagram below:
Defining your target audience.
The relationship between your organisation’s value proposition and the target audience can be slightly more complicated for social enterprises due to the range of external stakeholders often involved. External stakeholders are typically defined as the people or organisations either affect or are affected by your organisation.
Identifying your external stakeholders will allow you to define your target audience(s), thereby allowing you to define your value propositions to these audiences. When identifying external stakeholders, it may be helpful to use the following categories, which will often cover the typical stakeholders for a social enterprise. Your particular project will have emphases on different groups, depending on what it is you will be doing and how you will be doing it:
Understanding your target audience
As introduced earlier, understanding your target audience is a vital step in enabling your organisation to define its value proposition(s). Once you have defined your external stakeholders within your target audience, the next step is to examine the key features of each stakeholder group or audience.
Understanding target groups (e.g. beneficiaries or paying customers) will probably require the most in depth analysis. For this target audience you will need to understand:
- The size of the target audience
- The structure of the target audience (this will often involve trying to segment the audience into a number of core groups)
- The trends associated with the target audience (e.g. growth)
- The needs and characteristics of the target audience (this is vital to allow you to develop a strong value position that addresses the needs and demands of the target audience)
Source:
https://unltd.org.uk/portfolio/3-6-understanding-your-target-audience-and-defining-your-value-proposition/
Some key things this article has stated are:
-That establishing the target audience is an essential part of making a product that is usually done in order.
It is key to the marketing and selling of a product, which would come in the research section of preproduction. This then allows the business to grow and achieve success.
-You need to find more precise information about your target audience (e.g. age, typical habits, trends etc.)
-Finding the needs and demands of the target audience.
