Mastering Audience Targeting: A Guide to Identifying and Engaging Your Ideal Consumer Base

• Rising living costs and supply chain difficulties in the wake of the pandemic have caused a wave of economic uncertainty and consumer needs, motivations and behaviours have changed. The old rules no longer apply. Companies need to reassess their knowledge.
• Understanding the target audience is at the core of brand development. It is the foundation for effective marketing strategies, increases brand equity and ultimately improves a company’s bottom line.
• But “understanding” is not a destination. It is a journey. It is a process of constant review, improvement and adjustment. If you don’t regularly engage with your target audience, a brand’s performance will decline at worst or stagnate at best.
• Rising costs of living and supply chain difficulties in the wake of the pandemic have caused a wave of economic uncertainty and consumer needs, motivations and behaviours have changed. The old rules no longer apply. Companies need to reassess their knowledge.
• To ensure you have the tools and knowledge you need to understand your target audience and grow your brand, we’ve created this guide to help you research your target audience, segment them, and ultimately create accurate, useful buyer personas that will drive

1. Research about your target group

Every journey to understanding starts with defining your target group.Mark your audience on map and start reading about your audience likes dislikes and buying habbits.

What is the target group?

The target audience is the group of customers or potential customers who want or need (or would want or need) your products or services. These are the people who are most likely to search for, respond to and ultimately purchase your offering.

A good target group is:

1. specific

You can’t be all things to all people. There will be groups of people who aren’t ready or able to engage with your business, and including them in your target audience could do more harm than good. The specific trumps the general every time.

2. Data-driven

Instinctive feelings and assumptions have no place in defining a target audience. Inclusions and exclusions must be supported by unbiased data gathered through accurate market research. Assumptions can be a good starting point, but they are certainly not the end point.

3. customer-oriented

The target audience should consist of people who want to engage with your business, not the people your business wants to engage with. Potential customers should derive real benefit from engaging with your message or offer.

Example of a target audience

• Rising living costs and supply chain difficulties in the wake of the pandemic have caused a wave of economic uncertainty and consumer needs, motivations and behaviours have changed. The old rules no longer apply. Companies need to reassess their knowledge.

• Understanding the target audience is at the core of brand development. It is the foundation for effective marketing strategies, increases brand equity and ultimately improves a company’s bottom line.

• But “understanding” is not a destination. It is a journey. It is a process of constant review, improvement and adjustment. If you don’t regularly engage with your target audience, a brand’s performance will decline at worst or stagnate at best.

• Rising costs of living and supply chain difficulties in the wake of the pandemic have caused a wave of economic uncertainty and consumer needs, motivations and behaviours have changed. The old rules no longer apply. Companies need to reassess their knowledge.

• To ensure you have the tools and knowledge you need to understand your target audience and grow your brand, we’ve created this guide to help you research your target audience, segment them, and ultimately create accurate, useful buyer personas to inform your brand.
  
  
  

Understanding a target audience is at the core of a brand’s growth. It is the foundation for effective marketing strategies, increases brand equity and ultimately improves a company’s bottom line.

But “understanding” is not a destination. It is a journey. It is a process of constant review, improvement and adaptation. Without regular review of the target audience, a brand’s performance will decline at worst or stagnate at best.

In the end

General research methods

There are two types of market research used to collect information to define a target audience: qualitative and quantitative.

Both use different research methods and collect different types of data that you can use to gain insight into your product and brand from the customer’s perspective.

Both types of research are used together to get a complete picture of your target audience.

 Research Method 

 Qualitative 

Qualitative research is based on understanding experiences.

It usually doesn’t focus as much on statistics as quantitative research. Instead, it gives specific information about a small number of people and usually cannot be generalised.

It gives you a deep insight into specific aspects of your target group that quantitative, generalizable data may not be able to provide.

It is particularly useful when creating buyer personas.

Qualitative methods include the following:

Interviews

Interviews are usually conducted between a single researcher and a single respondent, either in person, by telephone or via a voice messaging system such as Skype. They consist of a series of structured questions (where questions are predetermined) or unstructured questions (where the interview is conducted in advance).

Focus groups

A focus group involves bringing together a group of customers/consumers in a controlled space where participants are invited to discuss a brand, product or service. Their interactions, attitudes and opinions are recorded.

Focus groups allow brands to gather verbal and non-verbal reactions to the product and avoid the structured nature of an interview. Focus group discussions are also more fluid, often revealing areas of interest and answering questions that interviewers or researchers may not have thought to explore.

Typical uses of focus groups include:

• Sensory testing (e.g. product tasting)
• Evaluation of advertising
• Evaluations of product or marketing ideas
• Testing consumer needs
• Brand perception of brand ideas or ideas or concepts
• Advice: The facilitator has a list of questions that the survey needs to answer, but the beauty of focus groups is the rich data that comes from discussion among the group once they are comfortable with each other. Sometimes the most insightful findings emerge when the facilitator steps back and participants ask their own questions of each other.

Diary

The market research participant may be asked to keep a diary or journal to record their experiences with your brand, product or service. This usually includes

Tip: 

Consumers often find it difficult to remember exactly what they did, when they did it and why they did it. When using diaries, try to encourage participants to enter their data as close to ‘real time’ as possible. This can often lead to more accurate and useful information about how people actually behave and why.  

Learn more:

Discover how Perceptive used diary keeping to help the MetService better understand how New Zealanders interact with the weather.

Observations

There are a variety of different types of observations, but they all follow the same basic principle: Observe participants as they use a product or service and note their reactions.

• Observations are generally used to gather information on the spot. This means that the participant is observed using the product or service in the scenario that they would use in real life.

• The participant’s behavior is recorded and later coded to determine the findings from the study. For example, a person using your company’s new vacuum cleaner might have to keep returning to the socket to plug the vacuum cleaner back in – this could show that either better user training on

• Your target audience refers to the specific group of consumers who are most likely to request your product or service and therefore the group of people who should see your advertising campaigns. The target audience may be determined by age, gender, income, location, interests or various other factors.

• Every year, $37 billion in advertising spend is wasted on ads that don’t appeal to the target audience. Download our briefing paper The Waste in Advertising to learn more. It only takes 5 seconds.

• Depending on what you’re selling, your target audience may be niche or broader. For example, if you sell shoes, your target audience will be broad, as all men, women and children wear shoes. On the other hand, you might be selling specific shoes for high-performance running. Then your target audience would be more niche – elite athletes between the ages of 20 and 40 who are interested in running or have run marathons. Either way, it’s important to define and segment your target audience to determine the creative messages that resonate with them and the channels they prefer.

Examples of target audiences

Target audiences focus on a specific group of people. This can be men, women, teens or children. They usually have a common interest, e.g. reading, running or cycling.

7 ways to identify your target audience

To identify your target audience, you need to take the time to analyze the data you receive from your customers, evaluate current buyers and buying trends, and tweak it as new information emerges.

The following steps will help you recognize your target audience:

1. analyze your customer base and conduct customer surveys

One of the best ways to identify your target audience is to examine who is already buying your product or service. How old are they, where do they live, what are their interests? A good way to find out is to participate in social media or distribute customer surveys.

2. conduct market research and identify industry trends

Look at market research for your industry to find out where there are gaps in service that your product can fill. Look at trends for similar products to see where they are focusing their efforts and then continue to focus on the unique value of your products.

3. analyze the competition

Marketers can learn a lot by looking at competitors to see who they typically sell to and how they do it. Do they use online or offline channels? Do they focus on the decision maker or the advocate?

4. Creating personalities

Creating personas is a great way to identify specific segments of your target audience, especially if you have a product that appeals to a wide range of consumers. You can use personas to identify the general demographics, personalities, and needs of your target customers. The persona of “Fran First-Time Runner” will appeal to different needs than “Sam Seasoned Pro”. Personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagement and other information that marketers can use to gain a more complete picture of buyers. This includes, for example, favorite hobbies, TV shows, publications, etc. It is recommended that marketers develop three to five personas.

5. Define who your target audience is not

There will certainly be consumers who are close to your target demographic but will not respond to your messages. Try to accurately identify who is and who is not your target audience. Is your target audience women or women between the ages of 20 and 40? If you know this, you can stop your teams from spending advertising money on segments that are not profitable.

6. Continuous review

As you gather more data and interact with customers, you will have an increasingly accurate understanding of your target audience. Based on this information, you need to continuously optimize and improve personalizations to achieve the best results.

7. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers extensive data about the users who visit your website. This information can be leveraged to determine key insights such as which channels your target audience comes from or what type of content they engage with and connect 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 your audience. Market research combined with customer interviews can give you better insights into what your customers are reading, thinking, and valuing. This provides important insight into what sources your audience uses and trusts. When creating them, consider using the following demographics and identifiers:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Hobbies
• Income
• Level of education
• Occupation
• Marital status
• Who they trust
• What they read/watch

conclusion

In conclusion, identifying and engaging your target audience is a dynamic process that requires a blend of specific, data-driven, and customer-oriented approaches. By employing both qualitative and quantitative research methods, and continuously adapting to consumer insights, businesses can effectively grow their brand and connect with their ideal consumers in meaningful ways.