CEO and co-founder of software development company KITRUM. Have an incredible team of skilled developers spread all over the world.
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Before you get into finding your target audience in any way, it can be helpful to have a formal overview of what this entails. Usually, your potential and current customers are divided into segments, and each audience has a priority segment. This priority segment is a group of people who bring in a significant portion of your profits, use your product more often, or have high demand for your product/service.
By identifying your customers’ needs and looking at them from their point of view, you’ll be more likely to understand how to differentiate yourself from competitors and discover which channels are the best for communicating with your customers.
Ultimately, it can help to know your target audience:
• Prepare a unique sales proposal to differentiate yourself from other companies in the market.
• Reduce advertising costs because you know where to look for customers.
• Improve loyalty.
It is essential to do this in as much detail as possible so that the abstract client becomes your assistant in business. Here are some demographics you should know about a potential customer: gender, age; location and place of residence; education; occupation and income level; hobbies interests; purchase intent, pain points; and who they read/watch/follow.
Imagine a man between the ages of 40 and 45 who has preschoolers, lives in a big city and works in the office late into the evening. He goes to family picnics on weekends and occasionally sports events, but keeps an eye on diet. It is already possible to select certain groups of goods that will interest him: inexpensive goods for sports, vitamins and nutritional supplements, barbecue equipment, etc.
After deducing and then confirming with research what this abstract person wants to get out of your product, this person will become more ‘alive’.
The target group is often heterogeneous; within it, small subgroups can be identified that may be interested in individual company products – the larger the company, the more such segments. For example, a pet store’s audience is made up of all people who keep pets. But among them there are separate segments: the owners of cats, dogs or aquarium fish.
If your company offers many products, consider the audience for each of them. It’s usually costly and ineffective to advertise individual products to your entire audience all at once.
Changing or adapting the target audience at critical moments can help businesses succeed. Take, for example, McDonald’s shift from kids to low-income families, Gucci’s shift from high-income adults to progressive youth, or Netflix’s shift from cinephiles to middle-income families.
Innovative ways to find your target audience
1. Analyze competitors.
When studying competitors’ marketing strategies, it’s crucial to keep in mind that they can make mistakes. This helps prevent you from getting wrong insights. A critical eye is also required when studying a competitor’s website: which features of the product are used by the competitor? Does the focus on these qualities attract the target group and do they meet their expectations?
Search data, link monitoring, and alerts can better reflect an audience’s interests. Tools like Ahrefs, Seranking, Semrush, Moz, Ubersuggest, BuzzSumo, SpyFu, and SERPed are all tools that I’ve found are comfortable even for beginners.
Even with all of these tools, you can’t necessarily gather information about how they do one-on-one business with customers. But you can call a competitor and introduce yourself as a potential customer. Pay attention to what questions they ask you and how they describe themselves. By asking questions, you gain insight into the requirements that potential customers place on the product.
2. Explore your existing audience.
There are many ways to collect information about your audience, but no single tool provides comprehensive information on its own. Only by collecting data obtained through different channels can you gain a better understanding of the characteristics of your target audience, including their behavior, methods and circumstances for making a purchase. I recommend to: use Google Analytics (I always check it once a month); Facebook Insights (if you have a Facebook page, this tool is rock solid); and your own CRM such as Hubspot, Zoho or CRM (here you can find out a lot about your customer’s intentions, pain points and concerns).
The target group itself will tell the best about its motives and problems. Start by conducting interviews and online surveys with those who have already purchased the product. Another way to get in touch with potential customers is to ask them to test the website. For example, ask them to look for information there or to place a certain order, then conduct an interview and determine what was necessary, useful or complex.
3. Find open data sources.
Large companies do market research and target groups. Some of these studies are in the public domain. Even a small lump of data from third-party research can help you describe your customer in detail.
The Google AdWords service is a tool that can help you assess the demand for a product. Similarly, Google Trends helps you determine whether interest in a product is growing or declining. In short, social networks are an excellent environment to learn more about your target audience.
4. Exclude people who are not your target audience.
To determine the target audience, I recommend performing market segmentation using five key questions based on Mark Sherrington’s 5W methodology).
• What? Product type.
• Who? Type of consumer.
• Why? Purchase motivation.
• When? Time for buyers to make a purchase.
• Where? Place of purchase.
This method will also help you understand who is not your target audience. You can then exclude them and save money.
5. Analyze the information.
Knowing how to define audiences, where to search, and how to segment them empowers marketers to make compelling commercial offers and create ad media that will be seen and appreciated. Advertising for everyone, without targeting, loses significantly in lead costs compared to locating a lead from a properly segmented audience.
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