Researching Your Target Audience: Key Tactics and Platforms to Utilize
A steakhouse brand advertising its products at a vegan event or an insurance company selling its housing policies to students are examples of huge misses on the target audience. Missing the mark on your target clients could cause damaging repercussions to your company. For instance, it is estimated that a whopping $37 billion is lost yearly in advertising to the wrong audience.
What Makes an Ideal Audience?
This is the subset of people who need what you’re selling. Knowing your customer informs you who your advertising and marketing campaigns should touch. This further helps you to tailor and personalize the message in a way that best catches their attention.
Furthermore, you get to know better what your customers want, and rather than throw in a bit of everything, concentrate on the essential features of a product or service.
It is, therefore, advisable for companies to dive into research to define their market. Here are the key tactics and platforms you can utilize to research your customers.
- Analytics
With a wide reach and high return on investment, social media has proven to be a force in marketing and advertising. In fact, 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on social media too, and insights into their target customers could be one of the reasons it attracts big names. For example, interactive platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, provide analytics on age, sex, and location. Hence, this helps you to know who you appeal to, thus determining your clientele.
Further analysis will also inform you of the best channel to reach them. For example, boomers are likely to be found on Facebook, while millennials and Gen-Z are active on Instagram and TikTok.
- Website Analytics
Just like in social media, use your business website for insights into specific attributes about your customers. You can analyze your traffic to understand your prime audience better. Website analytics will also give you a good impression of which product your clients prefer, helping you with market segmentation. Apart from Google Analytics, use tools like Smartlook, Clicky, and Matomo for detailed insights.
- Create a Buyer Profile
A buyer profile, or persona, is an imaginary illustration of a buyer representing your prospective customer. By creating this fictional profile, you can easily find solutions specific to them. This is a crucial step toward understanding your market, leading to the next bit of research, like customer feedback.
- Surveys
Organize questionnaires for prospective customers to understand their needs. If executed well, they can provide invaluable information, helping you reach your ideal clients and develop a customer-centric approach to giving them what they need and want.
To come up with comprehensive data from surveys and questionnaires, you may need to hire a UX researcher, data analyst, or market research analyst. You can find contacts of professionals on Leadar to help with the process and marketing strategy.
- CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) combines business strategies and systems to manage and track customer information across different channels. For example, the system can collect data from a website, signup form, or social media pages. Integrating this data makes it easier to trace and analyze a customer’s information.
Using CRM, you can easily see and analyze customer psychographics — buying patterns and attributes like age — which will help you understand your target audience better.
While many companies still use traditional software-based CRM, better AI-powered systems are emerging. Consequently, these new systems enable businesses to collect and analyze customer information faster and more efficiently.
- Competitor Intelligence
Research your competitors and find out their top customers. Also, look at your competitors’ business strategies and systems that enable them to attract that subset of customers.
Analyzing your competitor’s customer base and their strengths and weaknesses can easily inform you on what to improve to acquire a similar audience or even poach your competitors’ customers. Use tools like Phlanx and Sprout Special to analyze your competitors’ customer databases.
- Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are important in empathizing with your audience. They provide insight into what they feel is right and what needs improvement. For example, instead of losing a customer, adding the feature they need is easier. Additionally, this could be an issue with many more potential customers who may not raise their voices.
Identify the patterns and frequency of customer suggestions and calls for customization. If more customers call for customization, they are probably a great audience to target with your ads after customization.
Customer reviews can also reveal demographics and psychographics, telling you more about your core audience. For example, “My 8-year-old son likes this” shows children this age may also love this product, so you need to appeal to them.
- Qualitative Research
This research includes one-on-one interviews, case studies, and focus groups. These customer-based methods show what clients think about your products, their pain points, and their expectations. For example, customer interviews reveal the market needs and, more specifically, the user perception. This helps you understand your audience and their demand, including specifications and preferences.
- External / Independent Research
It is important to pay attention to independent industry analysts and research firms that produce reports about the state of the industry and customer insights. These reports can provide comprehensive, impartial statistics, beneficial insights on market trends, and recommendations to help you get the hang of your core audience.
Alternatively, you can also hire an independent firm to research the most suitable audience for you to target during advertising and marketing campaigns.
- Online Forums
Establishing an online forum where customers can engage with you or among themselves is essential for your business. This is also useful as it gives you insights into their demographics, opinions, and spending behaviors. Apart from your business’s forum, visit your competitors’ forums to get a feel of their audience and see what they do differently to attract that customer base.
Conclusion
Having a definite target audience is key for every business. It helps you customize the message in advertising and marketing and the product or service according to customer preferences. This, in turn, builds brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Remember that this is a continuous process, considering the typical seasonal trends and industry-standard shifts.
Regular in-house and external research is recommended to understand your clientele. For a start, build a buyer persona, conduct customer data analysis, and use insights from surveys and customer interviews. This profiling will create the ideal buyer’s image, helping you understand them best.
