Target audience

What Is a Target audience?

Your target audience refers to the specific group of consumers most likely to want your product or service, and therefore, the group of people who should see your ad campaigns. The target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests, or a myriad of other factors.

Depending upon what you sell, your target audience might be a niche or broader. For example, if you were a shoe vendor your target audience would be broad since men, women, and children all wear shoes. On the other hand, perhaps you specifically sell high-performance running shoes. Then, your target audience would be more niche – elite athletes between the ages of 20-40 who have expressed an interest in running or have run a marathon. Either way, it is important to define and segment your target audience to determine the creative messaging that will resonate with them, and pinpoint the channels they prefer.

The first step of audience targeting is data. It’s ALWAYS data.

This should go without saying but since we’re pretty thorough here, we’ll go ahead and say it: to do an effective deep dive into your audience, you’re going to need to find ways to collect some information from them.

The types of target segmentation

Demographic

Demographic segmentation separates your audience by who they are, depending on whether you are in a B2B or a B2C context.

Psychographic

Psychographic segmentation separates your audience by their personality.

This can be especially useful for businesses which sell a product or service that will make an impact on people with specific world views or ideas.

NB psychographic segmentations can include a lot of different factors. The above list is not exhaustive by any means; ensure that you cover as many “softer” psychological characteristics in your initial market research to ensure you don’t miss any important perspectives.

Needs-based

Needs-based segmentation groups your audience by similar needs and/or benefits a particular group is seeking. Needs-based segments have four broad categories:

• Problem-solving needs. Your product or service solves a problem for a group of your customers’ experience. (For example, gluten free products for customers with celiac disease). 
• Functional needs. AKA practical needs. Are customers looking for a way to make something easier, perform better, more efficient, less risky? (For example, a software developer might release a budgeting app to help customers manage their finances).
• Emotional needs. Do a group of your customers share an emotional desire or frustration? (Beauty companies, for example, create products that address specific frustrations such as wrinkles or acne).
• Value alignment. Products or services that align with personal values and/or beliefs (Halal and vegan products are good examples of this).

In many cases, a needs-based segment will fall into multiple categories, so it is important to consider each category and how it might apply to a particular segment.

Geographic

Geographic segmentation splits your audience depending on where they are located.

Segmenting in this way is best used when a customer’s location influences their purchase decision. This is going to be true for nearly any business, which is why geographical segmentation is one of the most popular forms of segmentation used.

The fact that nearly every business will have some kind of geographical information on their customers (obtained through address submissions for newsletters, coupons, apps, in-house services, etc) also makes this one of the easiest to implement as well.

Behavioural

Behavioral segmentation divides your audience by their previous behaviour in relation to your brand. 

Transactional (RFM)

Transactional segmentation, or RFM modelling, looks at the spending patterns of your customers to identify who your most valuable customers are and group them by behaviour. The model catalogues customers according to:

• Recency. How recently a customer purchased from your business.
• Frequency. How often they purchase from you.
• Monetary. How much they spent.

What kind of demographic information should you collect?

To start the process of analyzing your target audience, you’ll need to consider their demographics, which is just the basic info about the population that makes up your buyers. The easiest way to ask leading questions. For example:

1) What is the age of your targeted audience? Are they tiny tots? Tweens? Elderly?

2) What is their gender? Male, female, both?

3) How much money are they pulling in annually?

4) What is their family situation like? Married? Kids? Single and ready to mingle?

5) What do they do for a living?

6) What is their ethnic background?

7) Are they educated?

8) Where do they live, work and play?

Coincidentally, these are also the types of questions you’ll ask when finding influencers followed by this audience.

Ways to Determine Your Target Audience

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.

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 product’s unique value.

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?

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.

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 messages. Try to be specific in determining who your audience is and who it isn’t. Are 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.

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.

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 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 can 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.

Engagement activities with the audience

Generate a high volume of follower activity design to deliver on a specific campaign goal.

Sweepstakes and contest

Sweepstakes: This is a game of chance, after the drawing, a random choice is made, and the participant cannot influence the result. 

Contests: Chance is removed. The winner isn’t picked at random but instead picked by a panel of judges or votes.

Live chats

A short-lived, high-frequency dialogue among a group of influencers and their followers. Participation is often incentivized with low-cost prizes.

Power hours

Condensed publishing schedule where every influencer posts within the same short period.

Social takeovers

Influencers take the reigns on a brand social account and post co-branded content while engaging on behalf of the brand during the takeover period.

Surprise and delight

Offer an unexpected gift or experience of micro-influencers to receive authentic, earned social posts and engagement from their followers.

Coupon and free samples

Create a sense of urgency that inspires immediately and directly measurable sales activity with coupons or offer codes exclusively promoted by influencers.