Selection of the right audience for our product
How do we adopt a user? We need to attract his attention, make him take an interest in our product, convince him that he needs it, and prove the return on investment. Easy, but before we take the first step we need to define who our user is after all.
Well, why don’t we target everybody? We might, but it wouldn’t be rational — it is time-consuming, cost-ineffective, and it leads to loss of customers. So it’s a bad idea.
“No matter what product you sell or what service you deliver, more targeted marketing gives you a better return. Targeting a specific audience gets you in front of potential customers more often, with messages that touch them emotionally. If you try to be everything to everyone, your message becomes vague and less impactful.” [1]
We want our customers to return!
There are many criteria we should consider when selecting our target audience, and for this document, I will single out the most important one — industry. The business case we will be observing throughout this paper belongs to an industry that nowadays has almost no barriers in terms of user adoption. “Even though majority of respondents easily adopt modern technology, barriers that prevent the successful adoption of modern technology can occur during that process.” [2] As shown in the following figure:
[1] Business News Daily, „To Market Successfully, Your Customer Can’t Be ‘Everyone’“, https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5202-to-market-successfully-your-customer-cant-be-everyone.html, Accessed March 8th 2020.
[2] Mikulić I., Štefanić A., „The adoption of modern technology specific to industry 4.0 by human factor“, https://www.daaam.info/Downloads/Pdfs/proceedings/proceedings_2018/135.pdf, Accessed on December 5th 2019.
Why is knowledge of this segmentation useful for us? Because if we focus on entering the market with MVP, we can more easily predict which user groups we can count on at a given time and plan future development accordingly.
- Innovators — more prosperous consumer group; they like to learn and try new things; not afraid to take risk
- Early adopters — more educated, tended to be community leaders, less prosperous; groups that quickly test and begin using new technology
- Early majority — more conservative but open to new ideas, active in the community and influencing others
- Late majority — older, less educated, fairly conservative, and less socially active
- Laggards — very conservative, oldest and least educated; adopt technology last
[3] Sybson L., „Innovation Adoption Lifecycle“, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Bell-Curve-Innovation-Adoption-Lifecycle_fig1_291181159, Accessed on February 8th 2020.
A word about Generations…
In some previous articles, I might have mentioned the “generations approach” as one of the audience segmentation tools, but take this with a grain of salt — generations tell us just one part of the story and their behaviors can be hard to read, especially for new Gen Z which we haven’t „seen in full action“ yet. One more thing, they are subject to change, they transform as well — in the end, every generation grows up.
Nevertheless, it is important to know the trends of each generation, we can identify similar attitudes and behaviors and plan our approach more precisely. Just, we should be aware that this is just one way to group our customers, we need to go into more depth.
There is a rather innovative way of approaching customers, and it’s in somewhat relation to different generations — Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives [4].
[4] Prensky M., „Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants“, https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf, Accessed on May 10th 2020.
It is of most importance to review our potential customers from all aspects to understand their behavior and decision-making process as much as we can. It is far from just grouping them by generation label and a good starting point is to understand how they interact with technology.
Comments
Post a Comment
Respect...