Where Is Your Target Audience?

A very big and important question that every entrepreneur faces, or that they must ask themselves if it doesn’t come naturally, is: What is their target audience?

In answering that question, entrepreneurs mainly get into details about certain demographics and break down their target market into numerous categories; which is all great, really necessary and very important.

In a web context, it gets even more complicated, because it adds a bigger factor of location into the decisions that have to be taken, and entrepreneurs have to decide how open or closed to the world their new business should be.

If we take the case of Arab entrepreneurs launching their online businesses:

Should they target local internet users in the country they’re based in?
After all, they’re close, they have access to them offline too, they know more or less how they think, or at least it’s easier to get the information they need through local market research and studies, and well they’re part of the market and they know it pretty well; in other words: it just feels safer.

Or should they expand it just a bit to the whole Arab region?
Even if every Arab country has its own different considerations and unique culture, they’re not really all that different, they more or less share the same economic situations, they have the same backgrounds and very close traditions: it just feels quite predictable and controllable.

Or should they just take the jump and try to take it global?
After all, they’re online, they potentially have access to every connected person around the world, it’s an ocean of opportunity, so why limit themselves?

The answer, of course, isn’t just based on preference, or on the entrepreneur’s thoughts with regard to the previous points, many factors come into play, and many consequences result from the decision.

In the end though, I guess it all boils down to the following two points:

  • How wide and generalizable the idea is; will it work with a wider audience, in a wider context?
  • Whether they have the necessary time and budget to invest in scaling it and opening it up to more people; including technical, marketing, support costs and every other imaginable cost that goes with it?

Many people advise entrepreneurs to not corner themselves in a local market where they have limited opportunities for growth and to just aim globally from the beginning; but the thing is that not every business can do well globally, and not everyone can afford to go global, especially at the beginning of it all; starting small and doing great locally, building a reputation and then growing is certainly better than starting big and then failing miserably. But going for big and global, when it’s possible, and actually succeeding is even sweeter.

What do you think?