Defining Your Target Market: A Guide to Audience Research

Defining your target audience is one of the most important tasks as an advertiser. It is the basis of all the elements of your marketing strategy, both when developing products or services, giving them a name or defining through which channels you communicate them.

Your target audience is not "everyone." For this reason, your task in defining this audience is to identify and understand this particular group, so that you can dominate this market with your offer.

The better you know your offer, the better your chances of targeting your ads, so that you only pay to reach those audiences that will later become customers. In turn, if you increase the knowledge of your target audience, you will begin to see better conversion rates and return on your advertising investment, which are metrics that every advertiser cares about.

In this guide I will walk you through a simple process that will allow you to understand who is already interacting with your business and that of your competitors. With this information you can develop well-defined target audiences that help you build your brand.

Definition of the target market

A target market is a specific group of individuals that you want to reach with your marketing communications. These are the people most likely to purchase your products or services being united by common characteristics, such as demographic variables and behaviors.

The clearer the definition of your target audience, the better you understand how and where to find your prospects. You can start with broad categories like millennials or single parents but you need to have a lot more detail to achieve good conversion rates.

Be as specific as you can to focus your marketing efforts effectively. Those individuals who are not included in your target market can still buy your products, however they are not the main focus when putting together your marketing strategy. In other words, you shouldn't try to reach everyone, but you can sell to everyone.

Your target market should be based on research on your audience but not on mere estimates. For this reason, you must be willing to learn as much as necessary, adapt as you go, and finally communicate to people that they really want to buy your products. Keep in mind that the final customer group may not be the one you originally thought would buy from you.

How to Research Your Audience: 6 Tips

1 - Obtain information from your current clients

A great first step in finding who wants to buy your products is identifying who is already using them.

Once you have the definitive characteristics of your existing customer base, you can search for more people who have a similar profile.

Depending on how your customers connect with your business, you probably have little or a lot of information about them. Do not ask your audience for too much data during the purchase process just to obtain information, as this can annoy your customers and prevent them from making a purchase.

Either way, gather as much information as you can from your audience to assess trends. Some points to consider are:

• Age: You don't need to be too specific at this point as it doesn't make a big difference if your average audience is 24 or 27 years old. However, knowing what decade or stage of life they are in can be very useful.
• Location and time zone: Where in the world your users live is as important as knowing what geographic areas you can serve. This allows you to know what are the most important hours for your audience, so that your sales and customer service team can attend to them. In the same way, having this information will allow you to know what time it is best to publish your ads online.
• Idiom: Keep in mind that your clients do not necessarily speak your same language or the dominant language of the region in which your company is located.
• Buying capacity and patterns: What is the purchasing power of your clients, how they use their budget and what are their possibilities at the time of financing are fundamental points to take into account.
• Interests: It is important to know what your customers like to do in addition to using your products or services. This includes knowing what series and movies they watch and what other types of businesses they interact with.
• Stage of life: Knowing if they are college students, new parents, parents of teenagers or retirees are some of the options that you should identify from your audience.

 In the event that you offer products for companies, these categories will be somewhat different. In this case, you must obtain information on the size of these companies and information on the positions of the people who make purchasing decisions. Identify if they are the CEO or anyone else you need to deal with to set the tone for your communications.

2 - Observe your competition

Now that you know who is interacting with your business and buying your products and services, it is time to see who is interacting with the competition.

Looking at what your competition is aiming for can help you answer the following questions: Are your competitors going after the same group of customers? Are they reaching customer groups you haven't considered? How are they positioning themselves?

Although it is not possible to obtain detailed information on which users are interacting with your competition, if you can have an overview of the level of interaction between both parties. This analysis will allow you to understand which markets they are attacking and whether or not their efforts are being effective.

3 - Be clear on the value proposition of your product or service.

This is the main difference between attributes and benefits. You can list the attributes of your products, however you can not generate any sales if users are not entirely convinced of the benefits.

In other words the attributes would be what your product does while the benefits represent the results. Define how your product makes a person's life easier or at least more interesting.

If you don't have a clear list of benefits for your products, I recommend starting as soon as possible. To the extent that you create this list, you will automatically be building a kind of audience to satisfy.

For example, if your product helps connect customers with pet care centers, you can be pretty sure that your audience will be made up of pet owners who can most likely travel.

If you are not sure what benefit a user gets from using your product, you can ask them directly. You are very likely to find very creative responses to the different ways your customers use your products. This will allow you to see your audience differently for future sales.

4 - Make a "statement" of your target market

Now is the time to turn everything you've discovered so far into a simple message that defines your target audience. This is actually the first step in creating a branding document, but let's save that for another day.

For example, here is Zipcar's branding statement. We are particularly interested in the first part, which is where the definition of your target market is located.

“For users living in urban areas, with college education and tech savvy, who care about the environment that future generations will inherit. Zipcar is the car-sharing service that saves you money and reduces your carbon footprint, making you feel like you've been smart, you've made a responsible choice that demonstrates your commitment to protecting the environment. "

In this case Zipcar is targeting users who are residents of specific cities. They are not even talking about all users in specific cities that do not have cars. They are specifically targeting people who:

• Live in an urban area
• Has a certain level of education
• Are comfortable with the use of technology
• They care about the environment

These are all interests and behaviors that Zipcar can target using social media ads. In the same way, they help the company to better delimit its service area in general terms. 

When making your target audience statement try to incorporate demographic and behavioral characteristics that you have identified.

5 - Test ads on networks for your target audience

Now is the time to make the fun of it and see how your target audience setup works.

The first step is to create an ad and configure it especially for the audience you created. It is likely that you have content that you have previously used for other campaigns, but be honest and try to make this piece as focused as possible for this audience.

See if the language used is appropriate depending on the type of buyer you are looking for. In the same way, make sure that the visual part makes a whole and makes sense with the audience you are speaking to.

Going back to the Zipcar case, look at how the company speaks to the target audience it has identified. Remember that your market segment is "urban residents, college educated, tech savvy and environmentally conscious."

Once you have ready the pieces of content according to your target audience, you must determine in which social channels you should communicate. Keep in mind that the predominant audiences of each social network greatly influence the success of your campaigns.

Once the platforms have been chosen, you will be able to choose the segmentation parameters. Use the characteristics you defined in your target audience statement to build your ad audience.

Track the performance of your ads to see what kind of results you achieved. Once you've established a foundation, you can do A / B testing to learn even more about which targeting options work best. This will define if the above steps are configured correctly or if any adjustments are necessary.

6 - Review your audience's research if necessary

Your test results can shed new information that you didn't have when you first created your target audience. Make sure to incorporate any new information you get, and review your target audience statement regularly to make sure it best describes your potential customers.

Keep in mind that your target market can change over time, as can your product.

I hope that with these indications you can generate solid audiences that allow you to reach the public that wants to obtain your products and services.