As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. While this analogy is often used concerning advice-giving, it can also be a good representation of marketing to your target audience. The horse represents a market segment, while the water signifies your products or services. In other words, a brand’s marketing strategy and efforts are what attract customers to buy your goods or services. The caveat: in our modern economy, there’s rarely just one target audience. So how can you determine which is the right one to attract?
Understanding which horse is most likely to drink the water (or, in real speak, which consumers are most likely to purchase your product or service) shouldn’t be a guessing game. Through market segmentation, marketers determine target audiences by identifying potential consumers who may need their product or service. This is sometimes even regardless of whether or not the consumer is aware the need exists.
While segmenting may seem daunting, there are many things you can do to simplify the process while obtaining the most accurate results. This will leave you with a well-researched and cohesive target audience. Continue reading below for ways to ease the burden of market segmentation and better help you identify potential consumer audiences.
Learn from Existing Customers
One of the best ways to identify your target audience is to examine your existing customer base. Having an in-depth understanding of who has previously purchased your products or services is a great starting point for recognizing who you want to attract in your marketing efforts. Even better, this information is already at your disposal!
You can distribute surveys or conduct interviews with current customers to learn more about them; how they discovered your product or service; and why they ultimately decided to become your customer over competitors. This information is crucial to homing in on your target audience.
Utilize Google Tools
In conjunction with customer surveys, you can also research market trends and consumer behavior using Google Trends, Google Analytics or one many other tools to simplify the research process.
Google Trends provides insight into the popularity of search terms. Understanding what people are searching for allows you to adjust your content and messaging to be more appealing to potential consumers while simultaneously boosting SEO.
With Google Analytics, you can track your website traffic, identify the sources from which visitors access your site and note the content consumers engage with. These insights can help you make more data-driven decisions and tailor your content to drive interest and engagement. You can see the high-traffic pages on your website, so you know the best places to post content.
Complete a Competitive Analysis
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer―especially in marketing! Our competitors may be who we contend with for consumer sales and loyalty, but they can also be excellent resources for market research. Identifying who your competitors go after and which channels they use to reach consumers are vital insights for establishing our target audience.
While researching other brands in your market, you should also analyze competing products and services. What features do you offer that your competitors lack? Adjust your messaging in your value proposition to highlight the differences and why they are beneficial. This allows you to cast a more niched net to highly qualified potential consumers within your target audience.
Create Buyer Personas
With the information gathered through market research and customer surveys, you can then create a detailed buyer persona. Buyer personas are a model representation of your ideal consumer. Often described as “semi-fictional,” buyer personas possess all the qualities and attributes of your desired target audience members, encompassing the demographics, consumer or lifestyle behaviors, and motivations of a model customer.
The benefit of creating buyer personas can be seen across almost all corporate operations. From a marketing perspective, integrating buyer personas allows you to tailor your budget and marketing activities, ensuring your efforts generate the most qualified leads, resulting in more potential sales conversions.
Getting Started
Now that you understand how to identify your target audience, you can implement the above methods to cultivate a robust pool of consumers and craft your marketing and PR strategies. If you are hesitant to in the promotional side of things, the pros at D. Pagan Communications are here to help! Learn more about our digital services here.