Your Ideal Audience Is out There—You Just Need to Find It
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Customers are the most important partners that you’ll make when it comes to business. It goes without saying that without buyers, your products are pretty much useless because they sit there and do nothing for you. Ultimately, you’re going to want to define your own audience and you can typically do this by targeting them specifically, but how do you do this?
There are many different ways to target your audience, but the most common method is via price and quality of your products. Targeting budget-oriented customers or high-end quality customers are easy because they’re both on the extremes of the spectrum. You don’t need to balance out price versus quality in both scenarios because your focus is just one of them, which is what makes price targeting such an effective method of building your ideal audience.
Let’s take a look at why and how you can target your audience based on the price they’re paying for what they get.
Cheap and Cheerful
The first option is to go cheap and cheerful. This strategy is also known as cost leadership, and you can find a more in-depth description in Heartrepreneur’s take on cost leadership. When you think of companies like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and even IKEA, you typically think of budget-oriented things. This is one of the strengths of cost leadership; when you target budget oriented people, you usually attract a wider audience and the name of your company branches out to more people. Essentially, your entire claim to fame will be based on how accessible and reachable you are compared to other companies.
This essentially becomes your niche, which is why you need to focus all of your resources on building the cheapest products at the best quality. Although you can sometimes sacrifice quality, there’s a certain limit that you can’t go below or else you’ll compromise the integrity of your company. You have to know how to balance quality and price, but you should always lean towards the side of sacrificing quality for cost as long as the product retains its intended use.
Expensive and Exclusive
The other option is to go for the other end of the spectrum. When you make your products expensive, they either need to be exclusive or they need to warrant the cost. For instance, if you’re spending $100 on creating a product that you then sell for $150, you’re not exactly making a huge profit but it does warrant the price because of the investment required to make the product itself. This usually means that your product is better quality, has a longer lifetime and is, in general, better than cheaper competition.
The other option is to create something that is exclusive in order to warrant the price. If you ever see fashion brands selling exclusive collaborative garments and accessories, then you’ll understand how it works. By telling your customers that you’re only doing a limited run or print of something, you can sell it for a huge profit just because it’s exclusive.
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