How do you find the target audience for your software application? In the early days of developing software, you need to clearly define who your product is aimed to serve. If you don’t, you will run the risk of trying to sell a product to the entire human race, and that is of course not easy nor cheap. But finding a target audience is not always easy either. For example, how should your application improve the emotions of your future customers? How, if at all, should it affect their social status?
The answers to those questions are quite intriguing and deeply rooted in human behavior. This blog will give you a framework to make the process of finding a target audience more effortless!
Here is a video we have made on this topic:
Finding the Target Audience for Software Applications
Now, in a previous blog, we have covered how to find and articulate the problem that your application is solving, which is important to understand before you try to find your target audience. The Job to Be Done Framework will be used in today’s blog. This framework is a great starting point because it shifts the focus from who the customer is to why that customer is buying your product.
Here are the steps. The first part is to conduct interviews or investigations to find out more about your potential customers. You can then map out three different jobs, a functional job, an emotional job, and a social job. We will get to what those jobs actually mean a bit later. The last step is to identify pain points for the target audience and find out what their goals are. Let’s now go through each one of those steps together!
1. Conduct Interviews and Investigations
The first step is all about getting the temperature of your future competitors’ target audience. Firstly, I would find out how people today are solving the problem we identified earlier, and thereby find who my future competitors would be. Then, I would try to learn more about their unique situation. For example, what are people saying about the competitors in Google Reviews? Are there any subreddits mentioning them, and do they have a community of their own where you can take information?
If you want, you can even reach out to the users and conduct interviews or surveys. However, simply observing them in communities is a good starting point. Either way, the purpose is to get a feel of the pain they are experiencing. As you will soon see, that becomes important for later steps.
2. Map out the Different Jobs To Be Done
2.1 The Functional Job
It is now time to cover the three different jobs to be done, the functional job, the emotional job, and the social job. The functional job to be done is usually pretty straightforward. It defines the functional problem that the product aims to solve. A car’s functional job is to take you from point A to point B. A restaurant’s functional job is to reduce your hunger. And to continue the example I used in the previous blog about the problem to solve, our Excel add-in had a clear functional job – to solve all Excel errors within seconds.
2.2 The Emotional Job
The functional job might be enough if we intend to sell our product to AI. However, human beings are a lot more complex than that. We have something called feelings, and the emotional job takes care of those.
A great software product should be able to put the user in a particular emotional state, such as calmness, happiness, or powerfulness. As we identified in the other blog, the time wasted when fixing Excel errors is the real impact of the problem, and what emotion is associated with wasting time? Well, stress, of course! By choosing a calming color for the add-in and empathizing calmness in your communication, you make sure that the emotional job gets done, which will make your customers happier and more loyal.
2.3 The Social Job
The last job to be done is the Social job. Human beings are not only emotional, but we are also desperate to fit into a particular social group. Why is that? Well, the reason is quite interesting and relates to the primal part of our brain.
Let’s quickly take us back to a time when human society was far less developed than today, and when we were living in caves like a pack animal. Belonging to the pack was then very crucial for survival. If a human was unable to fully show that they were a part of the pack, they would be kicked out of the cave and would most likely die alone in the wilderness.
In today’s world, belonging to a particular social group is still very important to us. That need can help explain peer pressure in a friend group, and also the marketing of software products. But what are some examples of modern-day social groups? Well, it all depends on who you want others to think you are. For example, some people really want to seem smart, others really want to seem kind, and some just want to tell the world how good they are at coding software applications. Either way, you need to find out how your target audience wants to be seen by others.
Our Excel add-in company could, for example, write on their website about how the add-in makes users seem more professional and efficient in the office. By tailoring your product and marketing communication to the social group that your target audience wants to belong to, you will make your product even more powerful. Why? Well, because then, you can then speak directly to the primal parts of your customer’s brain!
3. Identify Pain Points and Goals
Now lastly, by this point, you have most likely become a lot smarter. However, it is only when you use that wisdom in your code and in communications that the framework has any effect. But that is far from easy, so a great way to know where to prioritize is to state what your target audience really cares about. Then, you can assess how well competitors do those jobs to find where your product can fit in.
Indeed, selling to human beings can be complex, but in many ways, that just makes the process a lot more fun.
Thank you for reading, Stay Curious!