Creating a marketing and communication strategy without knowing your target audience is like shooting in the dark. It isn’t possible to create an effective strategy without customizing your message to suit the right audience because, sans this, your strategy will be just words as far as impact and results go.
Focusing your marketing efforts on the most receptive audience increases the chances of sales, which positively impacts the return on investment (ROI). On one hand, while sales are boosted, creating long-lasting business relationships with customers who share mutual interests is possible.
A multifaceted approach is best to zero down on the right target audience. This would include consideration of age, location, gender (demographics), interests, lifestyle, values (psychographics), and purchase history, as well as online activity (behavioral patterns).
What is Target Audience?
The target audience is a particular group of customers the business wants to reach through effective marketing and product-centric strategies. The critical thing to note here is that it is a specific group that is being focused on and not the public, and this group is arrived at through a thorough analysis of their needs, interests, and characteristics.
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
Steve Jobs
The first step towards a successful marketing and communication strategy is knowing your target audience, as these are the people who need to be reached and feel in sync with the product.
Target audience examples:
Product — Software for project management
General — Business that are in need of project management solutions.
Specific — These can be: (a) small businesses that have remote teams and require a project management tool that is affordable and simple to use, (b) large enterprises that have complex projects that require a customizable and robust platform, or (c) creative agencies that need project management software which can integrate with their design tools.
7 Steps to Identify Your Target Audience (secrets of marketing experts revealed!)
An effective marketing and communication strategy depends on properly identifying your target audience. Therefore, the quality and accuracy of the identification are paramount. I have listed the 7 steps to identify your target audience so that whatever time and funds you allocate to your marketing and communication strategies provide the best ROI.
1. Analyze Your Existing Customers
The first step in successfully identifying your target audience is thoroughly analyzing your customer base. The parameters for the same are as follows:
- Demographic Analysis: This would include the age, location, gender, education, occupation, and level of income of the intended users.
- Behavioral Analysis: This studies the purchasing behavior, engagement with marketing-related campaigns, website interactions and the browsing history of customers.
- Preference Analysis: This focuses on investigating what the customer’s preferences are for brands, products, channels of communication and pricing range.
While this might seem daunting, to simplify things, use tools like Google Analytics to simplify the process. Surveys and CRM data, too, are other valuable sources.
2. Conduct Market Research
Once you have analyzed your customer base, you must score the market for potential opportunities. This can be done through observing:
- Industry-Related Trends: The latest developments and current trends of your industry should be studied, as through this, you will get a fair idea of the changing needs and preferences displayed by your target audience.
- Customer Behavior: It is essential to understand how consumer behavior works and what influences purchasing decisions. Can these purchasing decisions be affected by the social media platform employed, economic conditions, technology, etc.?
- Competitor Analysis: There is nothing better than getting to know the competition except perhaps seeing the competition’s target audience better. The gaps in competitor market coverage are low-hanging fruits of opportunity for you to score. Get to know the marketing strategies they employ, too, so that you can tap into what they haven’t.
Market research might seem obvious, but it is irreplaceable as you get to know more about the customer and a more profound understanding of your product’s competition and what it is up against.
3. Create Customer Personas
Though it might seem time-consuming, creating a detailed customer persona representing your ideal customer base is rewarding in the long term as it allows you to maintain the proper perspective and create relevant content.
Key characteristics that should be included can be broadly classed into two main categories: the Demographic (age, gender, education, location, profession, income level, family size, and marital status) and the Psychographic (Hobbies, interests, challenges, pain, points, lifestyle, values, aspirations, and motivations.
For example, urban children would be more inclined towards larger fast-food chains as their location, age, and income level would allow them access to fast food, as would their lifestyle in comparison to rural children. The same applies to branded clothing that caters to consumers’ aspirations to keep up with appearances.
Income level and profession, to some extent, determine the purchasing power, while interest, challenges, and pain points motivate the purchase, as does marital status
Customer Persona Examples: The persona depends, of course, on the product. For the first persona, we are dealing with a high-quality yet sustainable clothing brand, and the second is for technology gadgets that make everyday life easier.
Persona 1: “Samantha”, a 35-year-old businesswoman from New York City, prefers clothing to be sustainable, comfortable, ethically sourced and high-quality.
Persona 2: “Henry”, a 48-year-old entrepreneur, is from San Francisco and is exceptionally tech-savvy. He prefers innovative solutions that are both efficient and convenient.
4. Segment Your Audience
Creating marketing and communication strategies is more difficult when you try to put your entire audience under the same umbrella. Dividing your audience into manageable segments based on their shared characteristics allows you more freedom while leveraging your marketing campaigns towards personalization of experiences and targeted messaging. Common methods of segmentation include:
- Demographics: This would include the consumer’s age, gender, and location. Income and occupation, too, are included.
- Psychographics: These are related to the interests of the consumer that motivate them to make a purchase.
- Geographics: The region and city of the consumer have to be factored in here.
- Behavior: Consumer behaviors are a clear signal concerning purchasing trends. Consider the browsing behavior, online activity, purchase history and how the consumer engages with other marketing campaigns.
While knowing your target audience is a given, having them segmented makes it easier to tailor marketing campaigns, and this in turn increases their efficiency and effectiveness. Through market segments, you can vary your mode of marketing too based on audience preferences. For example, college students prefer marketing on social platforms and might not be too keen on email campaigns.
5. Leverage Social Media Insights
Social media too is a great source to get insights into what your target audience is interested in and what kind of marketing or communication form appeals to them. For starters, you can use:
- Facebook Audience Insights: It is perfect to analyze your audience’s interests, behavior, and demographics on Facebook.
- LinkedIn Analytics: Get more insights into the professional interests as well as the demographics of your brand’s LinkedIn followers.
The reason it is so important to analyze your audience’s engagement and demographics is so that you get an idea as to what your audience prefers to see on which platform. This way, you can have more impactful content and, at the same time, save time and energy while increasing engagement on social media channels
6. Use Surveys and Feedback
Surveys might sound old-fashioned, but they aren’t, as your potential customers provide a lot of information on their preferences and needs when they answer surveys or provide feedback.
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Get an accurate idea about the level of satisfaction your customers feel and know areas that require improvement.
- Product Feedback Surveys: This type of survey center on the product in question. Focus on getting feedback on the product’s pricing, features and how the customer found the product.
Feedback should not be just a one-off process. For feedback to be effective, try to collect it regularly so that evolving customer needs can be considered and the necessary adaptions made.
7. Monitor and Adjust
Creating a marketing and communication strategy and replaying it repeatedly will lose effectiveness sooner rather than later. The trick is to monitor your target consumers and adjust your strategy based on their changing preferences.
- Tools to Track Changing Audience Behavior: Use tools to track the interests of your audience, their online behavior and preferences. Tools like Google Trends and tools that are used for social listening are good options to get a better idea of the type of content preferred.
- Keeping Updated on Industry Trends: Just because you conducted surveys or checked feedback in the past does not mean nothing has changed, consumer behavior patterns change and so one needs to keep abreast of the industry.
- Regular Reviews and Revisions: Based on the data and insights that you get, it is important to be regular with revisions of your target audience and reviews of your present campaigns. Marketing is dynamic.
Through these 7 steps, you have a comprehensive approach to identifying and understanding your target audience. This will help you create compelling and attractive marketing campaigns to build better customer relationships and improve the growth of your business.
Types of Target Audiences
Target audiences can be divided into 3 types based on their purchase intention, interests, and subculture. I have further segmented these types of target audience into specific categories for better understanding below.
1. Purchase Intention
Why a customer is buying a product or service is an essential parameter to consider when building a marketing campaign. This is because the intention behind the purchase needs to be fulfilled for the purchase or conversion actually to happen.
- First-time buyers are individuals who have entered the market for the first time to buy a particular service or product.
- Repeat orders/customers are those who have already made a purchase previously and are doing so again.
- Loyal customers are those who show brand loyalty through their consistent purchase of the same product time and again.
- Switchers/ Tryers are those customers who are either switching brands or are tired or unsatisfied with the old one and are open to trying something new.
Clarity on the purchase intentions makes it easier to build a marketing campaign around the same for a more personalized message.
2. Interests
Another aspect to consider is what excites the user’s interest to making a purchase. Is the interest whetted due to a hobby, or is the consumer simply someone who enjoys being the first to try something new?
- Interest-motivated or hobbyist customers are motivated towards purchases due to a strong interest in a particular activity or hobby.
- Early adopters are individuals who are eager to try new technologies and products.
- Influencers have a good social media following and, through this, can influence their audience to purchase.
Apart from self-interest, customers are also influenced by recommendations, so when it comes to planning how a campaign is to be structured based on the product in question the strategy can be decided.
3. Subculture
Culture plays a big part when it comes to buying decisions and as a result, it cannot be neglected when it comes to communication. For example, while baseball is the all American favorite sport, if your target customer base is in the UK, you would be better off with cricket products.
- Lifestyle groups are individuals with similar values, lifestyles, and interests.
- Social groups are mainly consumers from a specific community or social group.
- Cultural groups consist of individuals sharing common cultural traditions or backgrounds.
By understanding these target audiences, you can create content based on the culture, purchase intention and interests. Switchers and first-time buyers, for instance, need more product information from a marketing perspective.
7 Benefits of Targeting the Right Audience
While gaining a better insight into your target audience by now might seem quite a task, the benefits outnumber the time invested, as without genuinely knowing what ticks your audience, your marketing efforts are half-hearted at best.
Here’s a list of the 7 benefits of targeting the right audience that helped motivate me to put in those hours of intense research.
- Improved Marketing ROI: Since you focus efforts on the most receptive individuals, it automatically positively affects the ROI.
- Enhanced Customer Engagement: Customer engagement and interactions are higher when messages are tailored through a personalization of experience.
- Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention: When businesses are able to address and understand the needs of their customers, there is a better chance of building strong relationships so that there is long-term customer loyalty.
- Better Product Development: By focusing on what the customer wants, product development decisions improve, as products can be created with better alignment to the preferences and specific needs of the target market.
- Streamline Marketing Strategies: Resource allocation is more effective when marketing efforts are streamlined to focus on specific audience segments.
- Stronger Brand Positioning: When you reach the right audience, the brand identity can solidify and become more consistent, while at the same time suiting the desired customer base.
- Optimized Customer Acquisition Efforts: The cost of customer acquisitions automatically is lower when businesses focus on customer segments that are the most promising, as efforts are optimized instead of generalized.
By strategizing based on your target audience, you reap better results than blindly copying what everyone else is doing. With all the effort, time and finances that go into marketing campaigns, it makes sense to do homework to maximize your investment.
Consequences of Not Identifying a Clear Audience
A business invests time, human resources, and finances in creating marketing and communication strategies. Failing to define a target audience has several negative consequences for a company. I have listed the consequences of not identifying a clear audience below.
- Wasted Marketing Budget: Any marketing effort, no matter how good, when directed at the wrong audience, will waste resources on advertising, other marketing activities or promotions on the wrong social channels.
- Low Conversion Rates: The marketing messages must touch a chord with the target audience for conversions. If it doesn’t, revenue opportunities are missed, and sales dip.
- Poor Customer Engagement: Low customer engagement and disinterest levels crop up when you cannot understand what your audience needs or resonates with. After all, engaging content caters to the customer’s preferences and if you are unclear on that front, expecting great engagement will remain a distant mirage.
- Inefficient Use of Resources: Effective allocation of resources is a challenge when you are unclear about your market. If products do not meet customer needs or if you are using marketing channels that your ideal customers are not using, it is an effort wasted.
- Unclear Brand Positioning: A strong brand image is needed to stand out from the crowd and help the customer understand what the brand is about. To achieve this, you need to focus on customers instead of switching focus and risking dilution of the brand image. Consistency in the brand message makes consumers comfortable, and this cannot be had if the brand keeps changing its position.
- Limited Customer Retention: When a product or service fails to meet the particular needs of the target customers, the chances of their making a repeat purchase fall dramatically. Thus, customer churn rates might be higher, but revenue eventually decreases.
- Difficulty in Scaling the Business: If you are not clear about your market audience and the business’ potential, then effectively scaling one’s business is impossible, as getting to know new customer segments and expanding the reach of one’s market isn’t viable.
- Missed Opportunities: Not being able to identify untapped market segments lowers the chances of innovation and growth due to missed opportunities.
- Negative Brand Perception: If customers see negative posts, reviews, or feedback by past customers that have not been addressed, or if they find that the marketing messages used are insensitive, lack taste, or downright offensive. Apart from being irrelevant, it damages the brand’s reputation.
Therefore, being clear on one’s target audience cannot be overlooked. It is a requirement; otherwise, why invest in marketing and communication strategies that are usually costly to implement when the resultant sales themselves cannot justify the costs?
Apart from this, once you have identified your target audience, you aren’t all clear; there are still some common mistakes you need to avoid.
Common Mistakes to Avoid (the 3 rules of thumb you must follow!)
Even after knowing your target audience, it is possible for a marketing strategy to backfire if you unintentionally commit any of these 3 common mistakes.
1. Targeting too broad or too narrow an audience
When your target audience is too broad, there are too many variations in customer types and personas to consider and this leads to ineffective marketing and ultimately, to wasted resources. While you might have a broad market, this is where the importance of segmentation comes in as it lets you focus on one part at a time, which is better than being generalized.
Similarly, when your audience is too narrow, it becomes a niche and this limits the potential of the customer base and comes in the way of long-term business growth or scaling up opportunities.
The rule of thumb 1: A balance between the two, i.e., a specific group of highly potential buyers but not a ‘too’ specific group, sets the right balance.
2. Ignoring customer feedback
When you close yourself to feedback or do not have any feedback mechanism in place, there could be a misalignment between your services or products and the needs of the target audience and your current customers.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Bill Gates
The rule of thumb 2: Welcome customer feedback not only as a source of reference for improvement but as a way to keep customers gauged and satisfied, they are more likely to come back.
3. Relying solely on assumptions rather than data
Assuming what your target audience likes or dislikes without having a basis for the same through data or research is most likely to lead to inaccurate conclusions, and this, eventually, become ineffective marketing campaigns.
The rule of thumb 3: Rely on research and not assumptions.
These mistakes can prove costly when blindsided, so ensure you factor them into your marketing plan. Furthermore, use a data-driven approach to understand and identify your audience effectively. Correctly identifying your product’s target audience will make your marketing campaigns more successful, and the business outcomes gleaned are more substantial.
Practical Tools to Identify and Analyze Your Target Audience
Analyzing your product’s target audience doesn’t have to raise alarm bells, as you need not do it yourself. Instead, you can get the data from tools like Google Analytics and Semrush and just put the 2 and 2 together for quick and easy competitive analysis.
Here are 4 of my favorite practical tools to identify and analyze target audience:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that is offered for free by Google. It tracks the traffic of websites and can provide valuable information on audience interests, behavior, and demographics.
I find it useful for understanding one’s current audience base as you can analyze demographic data location, age, and gender of website visitors while also getting insights on their interests. Apart from this, to see how effective your communication is, you can use Google Analytics to track user behavior and see which pages of your website have received the highest engagement and how visitors are interacting with the content.
Knowing about engagement and interaction is very helpful for identifying what your audience resonates with so that content can be personalized and tailored accordingly. While content might be king, the user is the queen in this game of chess, after all.
Google Analytics also provides features like user segmentation and audience insights, which, I feel, are great for gaining a deeper understanding of the various segments of visitors that your website received within the overall audience.
2. Semrush
Semrush provides you with a toolkit for comprehensive SEO and marketing. Along with this, it offers additional features for audience research and analysis. If you aren’t sure you need an SEO tool for starters, you can try the free tier, which will help you get a gist of things, though the features are limited.
I prefer to use Semrush for competitor analysis, as it saves time when you identify the target audience of your competitors and work to fill the gaps. Through this, it is simpler to find new audience segments that can be targeted.
By using their audience research tools, you can easily get to know the online behavior, interests, and demographics of your target audience. Plus, through the use of keyword research, you can zero down on topics and keywords that your target audience is actually searching for information on. This is perfect for tweaking your website or creating content marketing material that is tailored to suit your target audience.
3. SurveyMonkey
SurveryMonkey is an online survey platform that allows users to create and even distribute surveys so that feedback can be gathered from the target audience. They even provide a free tier.
These surveys are great for collecting data on the demographics, needs, interests, and pain points of your target audience. Surveys can be used to gauge how satisfied customers are and to identify areas that can be improved in the product or service offered.
One aspect I like about SurveyMonkey is that before product launch you can use it to conduct surveys so that you get feedback on marketing campaigns or new product ideas. You can in the later stages incorporate them into your digital marketing strategy too.
4. Audiense
Audiense is basically a social media analytics platform that provides information on the demographics, online behavior and interests of your target audience. It also provides a free tier so that you can check out its many features (thought to a limited extent).
I like the way Audiense presents its report post analyzing the interests and demographics of existing social media followers. This helps in better understanding your current audience base.
It makes identification of influencers within your target audience easier so that you can tap into their potential for brand amplification. You can get a better idea of how your brand is perceived through sentiment analysis and tracking brand mentions.
While leveraging these tools doe snake things easier, don’t forget to conduct thorough research too. Through this, you will get insights about your target audience, which is needed when creating targeted marketing campaigns. Apart from the marketing aspect, knowing your audience better helps in creating products that better resonate with your customers, and this, in the long run, leads to achievable business growth that is sustainable.
Difference Between Target Audience and Target Market
Given that business owners are not necessarily marketing professionals, they must be aware of the difference between the target audience and the target market. And no, they aren’t the same thing!
The target market is a broad group of potential customers the company sets goals to reach. This would be an overall pool of consumers that might show interest in the product. The shared characteristics of this group are based on interests, needs, or demographics.
On the other hand, the target audience is more specific, as a particular segment of the target market is focused on here. This group will most likely engage with marketing messages and become potential customers. They have specific behaviors, traits, and preferences, making them ideal for the product.
Target market are all potential consumers in a particular area, whereas the target audience is a specific group of potential customers from a particular area that are the most likely potential buyers.
Examples:
- Target Market: People who want to eat fresh salad for lunch.
- Target Audience: Young working professionals from urban areas who are interested in ordering a fresh salad for lunch and are willing to pay premium prices for delicious, innovative and hygienic salads delivered to their offices.
Therefore, while the target market is a broad category that indicates the wide spectrum that the company wants to cover, the target audience is more specific and has higher conversion potential. Focusing on them would be easier and would lead to higher returns, which is why one cannot overlook the importance of finding your product’s target audience.
Case Study/Examples
Case studies serve as a good reference for what to do and, more importantly, what not to do when it comes to marketing and communication strategies. The case studies I have mentioned below highlight the importance not only of a consistent brand image but also being sensitive to customer preferences.
Successful Marketing Campaign Example
Nike is a very good example of a successful marketing campaign that has been able to keep a foothold in a market of sports merchandise from global players like Puma and Adidas.
Target Market: People with an interest in either sports or fitness at a personal or professional level.
Target Audience:
Here we have 3 primary groups to consider –
- Athletes: Serious athletes who need gear that is high in performance.
- Fitness Enthusiasts: Those who give priority to their wellness and health through dedicated regular exercise.
- Aspiring Athletes: Those individuals who want to improve on their fitness.
For just running shoes, Nike has a score of advertisements, some that cater to athletes while others to people who simply love running or do it for fitness (Find your Greatness “The Runner” Ad). Thus, for each segment there are tailored marketing strategies, brand messaging and product lines. This is what has contributed to Nike’s global recognition, brand loyalty and significant market share.
Failed Marketing Campaigns
While Nike’s example showcased a successful marketing campaign, it has happened that big brands too have made costly errors when it comes to marketing to their customers. Here, are two examples that come to my mind:
1. New Coke (1985)
Coca-Cola had already achieved fame by the 1985s. To improve sales further, they did extensive research through taste tests and found that a sweeter version would be more appealing to customers. However, what this forgot was the nostalgia or the emotional connection that customers had already built for the original version.
The result: Consumers were not happy with the new version of the product, which led to a backlash and Coke had to withdraw the new version and return to its original formula.
2. Harley-Davidson Perfume (1990s)
When you think of the brand name Harley-Davidson the first thing that comes to mind is a biker on a lone highway riding a powerful motorcycle. While this is the brand image that Harley-Davidson built and resonated with its audience, in a bid to scale into new avenues they tried to expand into the fragrance market.
The result: The perfume was targeted to women, and this failed to resonate with its core audience of motorcycle enthusiasts or to the general female population. This is a good lesson in how the brand image needs to be aligned with the preferences of the brand’s target audience.
That is why there is no substitute to doing through audience research and applying some understanding of the audience’s needs.
Upon an identification and targeting of your product’s right target audience, you can not only maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, but also at the same time build brand loyalty and also achieve sustainable growth.