Business blog #6: Finding your target audience

We live in the world, where many things are much more accessible than before. You can start a business, with less than 100€ right from your living room, get tremendous amount of knowledge (e.g. audiobooks) right to your pocket or you can advertise your product to anybody with really tight budget (even with 1€ you can get some valuable insights).

Let’s examine last point into little bit more depth. 20 years ago your marketing options were much more limited and much more expensive than current ones.

Imagine that 20 years ago you were about to create your first TV commercial. It would cost you who knows how much. You create the commercial based on some hypothesis about your target audience. You could certainly test your hypothesis through some questionnaires on some sample of people, but you couldn’t be 100% sure about your hypothesis till the point, when you broadcast your commercial.

Your commercial does not perform as expected, so next time you use everything what you learned to make better one. This process doesn’t sound cheap at all right? That is the reason why only “big players” could effort the advertising.

Thank God, lot of things chained from 20 years ago. Now, you can advertise for something little as 1€ per day and you can target your audience as precise as never before.

If you never played around Facebook Ads account, I highly encourage you to do so. You would certainly experience numerous mind-blows, when you realise the power which you posses.

In previous article I indicated that I need to find out who precisely is my target audience and what type of content works for that target audience the best.

Hypothesis 1: People from Slovakia and Czech republic will engage with my content more if my ads will be in Slovak language, then people from US (ad written in English).

I created two audiences. Both of them had the same interests (Motivation related), but one of them was targeted on US and second one on Slovakia and Czech Republic. I used same ad for both audiences (only description was in different language). Both of them were active for 24 hours. Results?

There were no likes from both sets of ads. But, you can see that audience from Slovakia and Czech Republic engaged with my ads much more (Unique link clicks). That means, that most of my hypothesis are still off (I want to get more follows on my Instagram, and I didn’t get any) but now I know that it is probably better to target my attention on a region, where I live in. This learning cost me 6,51€.

When starting a new business you should focus on minimising time of one Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.
Test your hypothesis! You might be wrong with your thinking and you can find it out really cheaply nowadays. Be grateful for that. :-)

For me, there are still many more hypothesis to test. This was the first one. What type of ads will catch the most attention? Any tips for further testing will be much appreciated.

Thanks for reading.