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Logout7 Ways to Determine Your Target Audience
To determine your target audience, you must spend time analyzing the data you receive from consumer engagements, evaluating current buyers and purchase trends and optimizing as new information is revealed.
The following steps should help you realize your target audience:
1. Analyze Your Customer Base and Carry Out Client Interviews
One of the best ways to determine who your target audience is to look at who already buys your product or service. How old are they, where do they live, what are their interests? A good way to learn this is through engaging on social or distributing customer surveys.
2. Conduct Market Research and Identify Industry Trends
Look at the market research for your industry to determine where there are holes in service that your product can fill. Look at trends for similar products to see where they are focusing efforts, then hone in further on your products unique value.
3. Analyze Competitors
Marketers can learn a lot by looking at competitors to see who they are commonly selling to, and how they go about it. Are they using online or offline channels? Are they focusing on the decision maker or the supporter?
4. Create Personas
Creating personas is a great way to drill down into the specific segments that make up your target audience.This is especially helpful if you have a product that appeals to a wide swath of consumers. Personas allow you to determine the general demographics, personalities and needs of your target consumers. The persona of “Fran First-Time Runner” will speak to different needs than “Sam Seasoned Pro.” Personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from to give a more complete view of the buyers. This might include favorite hobbies, television shows, publications, etc. It is recommended that marketers develop between three and five personas.
5. Define Who Your Target Audience Isn’t
There will certainly be consumers who are close to your target demographic, but who will not act on messaging. Try to be specific in determining who your audience is and who it isn’t. Is your demographic women, or women between the ages of 20 and 40? Knowing this will keep your teams from devoting ad dollars to segments that will not yield returns.
6. Continuously Revise
As you gather more data and interact with customers, you will get an increasingly accurate understanding of your target audiences. Based on this information, you must constantly optimize and hone personas to achieve the best results.
7. Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers extensive data about the users visiting your site. This information can be leveraged to determine key insights such as what channels your target audience is coming from or what type of content they’re engaging and connecting with the most, allowing you to make more data-driven decisions during the media planning process.
How to Create Target Personas with The Right Demographics
We’ve already established that creating personas can be another great way to understand audiences. Market research paired with client interviews can give you better insights into what your clients read, think and value. This offers important understanding into which sources your audience uses and trusts. When building these out, consider using the following demographics and identifiers:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Hobbies
- Income
- Education level
- Profession
- Marital status
- Who they trust
- What they read/watch
Additionally, look into the following:
- Your current customer base
- Who your competitors are targeting
How to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve created personas, the next step is to find media that targets these specific segments. Below are some tools to get you started:
Media Kits
Media kits from publishers give a clear idea of the audience segments they reach. These can be broken down by job titles, income levels or hobbies depending on the brand. When selecting where to invest ad dollars, marketers should ensure that secondary audiences aren’t included in these totals. For example, magazines are often passed along to friends and family. This long shelf life is beneficial for marketers, but should not be included when deciding on where to buy as they are estimates. Use the paid subscribers when making decisions or negotiating on cost.
Nielsen Ratings
Using statistical samplings, Nielsen is able to predict how many households view a certain show. Although prime time may seem like a great bet to reach wide audiences, you may discover that more niche shows in the early or late fringe will reach your target audience for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true as more channels and shows make television highly fragmented.
Social
Social media allows you to target ads based on various demographics and interests. Although the audience can be very precise, different demographics consume media differently. Some users may not be receptive to business related ads on Instagram, but may respond more positively on Facebook. It is also important to measure the success of different types of ads on these platforms – like display versus native. Test various platforms to see what drives results.
Third Party Information
Marketing analytics platforms such as the Marketing Measurement and Attribution Platform can help you identify what outlets your target audiences frequent or television shows they watch. When selecting a partner, investigate how these companies identify how to reach the target audiences. Are they using outdated data or do they have media partnerships?
How to Reach your Audience at the Right Time
When marketing to today’s empowered consumers, it is not only about knowing where to reach them, but also when to reach them. As consumers become more adept at tuning messaging out, marketing in the right moment will pay dividends.
There are several important considerations to ensure right-time marketing across various channels:
Television
With the invention of DVR, viewers no longer have to sit through commercials. This means that even with the right target audience, you can’t necessarily guarantee views on commercials shown in the middle of any show’s break. When negotiating television slots, focus on either being the first commercial before a break or the last one at the end of a break. Even better is live television (including the late-night news or sporting events). Since these are live, it’s guaranteed that more people are watching at the moment rather than pressing the fast forward button.
Radio
Since listeners often switch radio stations at a commercial break, make sure to book ads at either the beginning of the break or the end if possible. Also, be sure to pay attention to DMAs (Designated Market Areas). DMAs are provided by Nielsen and are based on signal strength. For example, the Boston market also includes Rhode Island and Southern New Hampshire. It is important to keep this in mind, because although radio is a great way to reach local consumers, it may also include listeners outside your target region.
When booking an eblast with an outlet, consider its timing. Fridays are a common day for people to take off, so sending an email out on a different day may increase your open rates (unless the data says otherwise).
Disadvantages of Target Audiences
Although target audiences are a great tool, marketers should remember that additional opportunities may exist in the marketplace. If bands need to reposition themselves, they may better connect with a different demographic. There may also be use cases for products that haven’t been considered. Combining target audiences with analytics tools can help identify some of these missed opportunities to further capitalize on them.