Target Audience Insights: Craft Sales Decks That Truly Connect

What is a successful sales deck? Surely, it is the one that helps you promote your product. It resonates and converts the audience. Yet, surprisingly, as many as 42% of marketers don’t know their target audience. If you choose the wrong audience, it will lead to empty effort and failed projects, even though they may have shown the necessary potential.

To keep you away from potential pitfalls, today we’ll talk about how to define a target audience for a sales deck step-by-step, share valuable field insights, and list handy tools that will help analyze your audience and optimize your sales deck.

Keep your pens poised. There’s a lot to discuss! 

Understanding the Concept of a Target Audience

Before you can define your target audience for a sales deck, you must figure out what the general concept of it means. Simply put, your target audience is a group of people who should be potentially interested in the services you provide. Usually, the group shares common characteristics such as interests, demographics, needs, or behavior.

If you wrongly identify your target audience, you risk spreading a message that does not trigger a desired response or seems irrelevant to the group. Let’s say you launch a new luxury cosmetic product and start to market it to a younger group of people who may not be interested in the unique rejuvenating features of the product nor can they afford it at the given time.

Apart from that, if you know your audience well, you can foresee upcoming obstacles and challenges and overcome them with ease. As you familiarize yourself with the potential concerns of the groups, you will be able to provide a solution that solves those better than any existing competitor. Let’s say you are trying to sell financial services to a small business. Knowing that the company may be tight on budget, you can emphasize the cost-saving potential of your solution, highlight better cash flow management, and provide personalized support to seal the deal.

Simply put, a well-researched concept of the target audience is your foundation. The gathered insights will help you create a sales deck that features the right design, content, and tone that resonates with a chosen group.

Steps to Identify Your Target Audience

When it’s time to determine your target audience for a sales deck, we suggest you take the following steps to succeed with the task.

Market Research

Creating a target market slide in a sales deck is much more challenging than it initially seems. A lot depends on effective market research, so you must put in a fair share of time and effort, let alone detailed analysis, to learn more about your target audience. The Whitepage experts have outlined handy tips you may want to consider when you reach this stage. They are the following:

• Gather as much insight as you can. You can refer to different reports, surveys, forums, polls, and other relevant and reliable sources to complete the consumer puzzle. If you know what they like, what they need, and how they act, it will be twice as easy to come up with a solution to which they can’t say ‘no.’
• Outline upcoming trends and lucrative opportunities. Various industry reports, competitor analysis, and forecasts will point you in the right direction.
• Use available data analysis tools such as Google Trends or SEMrush. These tools will help you analyze more information faster.

Analyzing Customer Data

Customer data is one of the most trustworthy sources of information on user behavior and preferences. That is why you should be able to gather and interpret it correctly.

• Use website analytics, email marketing platforms, and CRM systems to gain necessary insights.
• Outline the main metrics that define your target audience. It can be purchasing history, demographics, or feedback that will guide you in the right direction.
• Data visualization tools such as Tableau, Mouseflow, or Mixpanel can help you structure the gathered data so that you can see clear patterns and trends. This information will present actionable room for customization and personalization.
• Use segmentation. Suppose you present an all-encompassing or highly customizable solution. In that case, you may want to divide your target market into smaller groups(segments) based on user age, location, interests, etc., to make the marketing efforts even more effective.
• Analyze your existing client base. In case you have a loyal customer base, you can search for tracks and patterns that unite them.

Creating Buyer Personas

A success-driven sales deck target audience slide will present better results if you spend enough time creating an ideal buyer persona. The buyer persona is a fictional character that corresponds with your understanding of an ideal client. It is usually formed based on current market research and updated customer data. You will require a fair share of critical elements to create a perfect buyer persona:

• Key demographics(age, gender, income, occupation, etc.)
• Main psychographics(values, interests, preferences, goals, etc)
• Pressing pain points(you will find them through an in-depth analysis of existing user feedback)

You can create more than one buyer persona and then customize your sales deck to address separate pain points, various interests, and metrics. However, it is vital to regularly update your personas since new data and trends can have a tremendous impact on them.

Applying Audience Insights to Your Sales Deck

After you define your target customer for a sales deck, you must create a deck that resonates with the audience. That is where audience insights come of great use. If you apply these insights thoughtfully, you will get a more personalized, impactful, and motivating presentation.

• Content. When you know how to define a target market for a sales deck, you can use the challenges, pain points, and objectives of your target audience to tailor your content so that it addresses those perfectly. Moreover, knowing your audience allows you to use the type of language that resonates with them.

Example

If your primary clients are growing businesses that care about an increase in revenue, you can present a solution that boosts profitability. There’s little need to dive into intricacies and technicalities. You can use simple speech and storytelling to win them over.

• Tone. The tone of the presentation is as critical as the main message. While some people react to a casual tone better, others may prefer a more professional approach.

Example

Gen Z will surely respond positively to a more informal tone, with some memes, pop culture references, and humor.

• Design. While the design of the presentation must correspond with your brand identity, you should also consider the audience’s preferences. People are more perceptible to visual messages, and you can use it to your benefit. Don’t limit your deck to barely the aesthetic sensibilities of the audience. Think about accessibility, too.

Example

A more conservative audience is known to react to a clean and to-the-point design with muted colors and professional fonts. At the same time, a more artistic and creative audience may prefer something unusual, bright, dynamic, or even playful.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

When you wonder how to choose a target audience for a sales deck you must realize that there are certain pitfalls to keep away from. We’ll list a few common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

• Assumed homogeneity. All people are unique, and that is the rule to mark ‘important.’ If you assume that one size fits all, you risk missing out on critical details that will help you find a separate, successful approach to different groups of consumers. Each segment of your target audience may have specific needs that you will fail to address if you overgeneralize them. Thorough market research and consumer analysis, along with relevant segmentation, will help you steer clear of the murky waters.
• Outdated information. Buyer personas, along with overall audience requests, tend to change over time. Outdated user insights will point you in the wrong direction, leading you to create a sales deck that does not resonate with the audience. To avoid that, you should constantly monitor market trends, user behavior, and client feedback.
• Lack of solid proof. You may assume that your product is exceptionally useful and relevant, but you need facts to support your strategy. Once again, market research and consumer data analysis will help you to avoid false assumptions.
• Neglected feedback. You can’t be biased about genuine user feedback. People share their thoughts and opinions about what is potentially wrong with your product and how you can improve it. If you listen to your customers, you will learn how to fix previous mistakes and grow. You can go as far as to initiate feedback responses by sharing various pools, surveys, and other available means of gaining user insight.
• Lack of empathy. Not everyone grasps the importance of empathy when it comes to sales. If you can put yourself into your audience’s shoes, you will be able to see things from their perspective. This means that you will be able to improve your strategy, gain credibility, and find the right approach to the audience.

Case Studies and Success Stories

Very often, real-life examples come of great use when choosing a target audience for a sales deck. Not only can they reflect that a well-thought-out and strategic approach to identifying a target audience works, but they also highlight practical pointers to inspire from or to replicate.

Example 1: Market research

Many companies have succeeded due to a well-chosen target market. We’ll use Apple as a relevant example. Before the iPhone was launched, the founders decided to focus on a tech-savvy but open-minded audience. They researched the segment, identified pressing needs, interests, and preferences, and presented a non-existent high-tech device that dominated the market soon after.

Example 2: Consumer data analysis

We won’t surprise you by stating that Airbnb is a world-famous company with millions of clients all over the globe. How did they get there? With an initial idea to help those tight on a budget find affordable accommodation, they further scanned the segment and figured that there was interest in the deal for the host. Through this user data analysis, Airbnb founders decided to broaden their target audience. Need we mention the success of the approach?

Example 3: Buyer persona

Being a global sportswear company, Nike approached each consumer category differently. For instance, when launching their running shoe line, they created a unique buyer profile – a young, active person with a taste for trendy and appealing sportswear. Such an approach resulted in a product that covers specific consumer segments’ needs, corresponds with their preferences, and suits their budgets.

Tools and Resources

These days, there are many effective and reliable tools and resources that will teach you how to build a target audience for a sales deck. These are various analytical tools and platforms that assist in the sales deck creation process. Whitepage experts have outlined a few options to give you an idea of what to look for.

• Google Analytics – a traditional analytical resource that provides website traffic insights, user behavior patterns, demographic metrics, etc. The tool will help you understand your online audience better and indicate the effectiveness of your strategy and marketing approach. It is free to use.
• SEMrush – is a paid all-in-one digital marketing resource. You can do SEO, competitive research, keyword analysis, and many more on a single platform. As you familiarize yourself with your target audience, you will gain insight into competitor strategies so that you can produce a better approach and present a solution that outshines the competition.
• Prezi – it is a free/paid presentation design solution that relies on AI-assisted templates. You can create, store, and enhance the presentation within the same workspace.
• Canva – is a user-oriented graphic design platform. It comes in three versions: free, pro and team. Each version has its perks, but overall, the tool is highly customizable and effective when it comes to presentation design.

Conclusion

Understanding your target audience is one of the primary keys to creating a successful sales deck. It takes a thorough approach to complete a detailed consumer base analysis, but in the long run, it is worth the time and effort spent in the process. The better you understand your audience, the easier it will be to provide a service or solution that genuinely resonates with them, leaves a desired impact, and inspires the right action.

Expert advice shared in this guide will keep you on the right track and help you avoid making mistakes that may cost you all the invested resources. However, it is a lot easier to entrust your sales deck to seasoned professionals and reap the benefits of a professional, targeted, and impactful presentation. Schedule your discovery call with a Whitepage agent today, and our team will provide necessary assistance with target audience analysis, content customization, design optimization, and more!

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