Who is your target audience? 5 demographics you can use.

Understanding your target audience is perhaps the most important first step in deciding on any marketing campaign. Print advertising and direct mail are certainly the broadest methods for communicating with your audience – doesn’t everybody read a newspaper? Have a mail box?

Not necessarily. Newspapers are notoriously in decline with most now turning to online editions to grab at reader share, and the public view of direct mail is often less than flattering.

Text message marketing can send your marketing message direct to your customer’s mobile phones – an on-demand, convenient service that builds loyalty and maintains interest for under 10c. (Imagine If you were told you could buy as many customers as you liked for a dime each!)

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But how do you determine if your target audience is the right one for this type of service (or any other, for that matter)? We suggest you analyze your market by considering the following –

Age – Text messaging is the most popular communication method amongst the 13 – 24 age group and continues to grow faster than calls, email and even social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
Location – Are your customers local to your restaurant and likely to make impulse purchases or do they travel further with planned visits from outlying areas. This can influence the type of offers you may look to use, how long offers are valid for etc.
Occupation – Of course the student demographic is a very attractive one for the application of text messaging, based upon the age group and also relative trust and willingness to try ‘new’ communications media. High concentrations of office workers may benefit from lunch time offers or group discounts.
Competition – If the competition is fierce in your location it may give you an advantage to get to your audience before they have given consideration to other restaurants. Where there are few alternatives you may be competing against home cooking, brown-bag lunches, money saving.
Affluence – How vulnerable is your audience to changes in economic conditions? Are they likely to react favorably to discount coupons? As an alternative, upmarket restaurants can maintain an air of exclusivity by creating members clubs and using text messaging to communicate special events, significant menu changes or additions to the wine list.

If you thought that text messaging ‘just wasn’t for you’ perhaps an analysis of your target audience will change your thinking. Alternatively it may simply reinforce your original opinion, and identify other communications methods that maybe you never thought of..

Regardless, target audience review is to thoroughly examine who your customer base really is and adopt appropriate marketing tactics.

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