You’re Unique and so is Your Audience: A Brief Guide to Identifying and Reaching Your Target Audience

Somebody writing the word ‘audience’ on a whiteboard: Image courtesy of Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

Say you have the perfect product or service, a gigantic advertising budget, and an unbeatable price… So then why is it that you aren’t making as many sales as you expected? Well, you may have overlooked one of the most important factors in marketing, your target audience.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a descriptive representation of the group of consumers (target market) that your brand should be aiming your marketing efforts towards. The consumers in your target audience all share similar characteristics in terms of their behavior and demographics.

Defining your brand’s target audience is very useful for understanding who your optimal customer is, how you can successfully reach them, and what will make them actually buy your product or service.

Identifying and Reaching Your Target Audience: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

Segmentation 

The first step in identifying your brand’s target audience is to use a process called segmentation, which is when you take people from a broadly defined target market and put them into smaller groups (segments) based on their shared characteristics.

For example, if you are a freelance video editor, your general target market might be ‘content creators’, however, that group can be divided even further into smaller segments such as ‘YouTube gamers’ and ‘travel vloggers ‘.

Segmentation is essential because these smaller groups each have individual needs and require a customized marketing experience.

Audience members sitting together in groups: Image courtesy of Aranxa Esteve on Unsplash

Here are some characteristics that can help you segment your target market:

• Demographics: This includes easily measurable, numerical information about a population such as:

   1) Location

   2) Age

   3) Income  

   4) Gender

   5) Occupation.

• Location: This refers to where in the world your customer lives. It is helpful to know, as different locations have different cultures, languages, laws, etc. that need to be considered when building your marketing strategy.

Even the time of day that you post your marketing content is greatly affected by the time zone that your target market is in.

• Psychographics: Unlike demographics, psychographics are the characteristics of a population that can NOT easily be defined by numbers.

They are the psychological and social characteristics that define a customer’s behavior when they are making a purchase or engaging with a brand.

 A few common psychographics include:

 1) Lifestyle

 2) Hobbies  

 3) Entertainment Preferences

 4) Attitudes.

• Behaviors: These are the consumers observable actions and patterns when making a purchase or engaging with a brand.

If psychographics tells us ‘why’ consumers behave in certain ways, behaviors demonstrate ‘how’ these behaviors are manifested.

Some common consumer behaviors include:

1) Buying Frequency

2) Brand Loyalty

3) Nature of the Purchase

Now that you know some ways to segment your target market, you should start doing some research to find out which segments exist within your current customer base. This assumes you already have some customers.

However, if you’re just starting out, this information can still be useful in the future when you ‘re-define’ your target audience.

Here are a few tools you can use to segment your target market:

1) PRIZM: This is a handy tool where you can enter a postal code and it will describe the typical type of person that lives in that area.

I tried it out for myself, and it was very accurate. Out of 67 different segments, the ‘social networker’ is a good representation of me, and the other people who live in my geographical region.

PRIZM also provides a detailed description of the characteristics that represent each segment including their interests, hobbies, shopping habits, the car they drive, education, home type, etc.

City Skyline: Image Courtesy of Bing HAO on Unsplash

2) Google Analytics: This is a tool that all businesses should be utilizing. Google Analytics allows you to divide your current audience into segments related to their demographics, technology, behavior, date of first session, traffic sources, etc.

With this tool you can look at two types of segments:

   • User segments: These segments represent users who have visited your website multiple times over a 90-day period.   

   • Session Segments: In this type of segment, the user’s behaviour is documented across one single session.

Depending on which trends you want to focus on, you can choose to use Google Analytics’ default segments (system segments) or ‘custom segments’ that are created by you or imported from Analytics Solutions Gallery.

3) Buyer Persona: With all the information you’ve gathered about your audience so far with PRIZM and Google Analytics, you can now create a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents the key characteristics of your target audience. A good buyer persona describes this hypothetical customer in great detail while also being broad enough to represent the target audience as a whole.  

The purpose of a buyer persona is to ‘humanize’ your customer instead of viewing them as a number. Using this approach allows you to understand your target audience on a more intimate level. As a result, your marketing efforts will feel more genuine, and they will resonate better with your audience.  

Get started on your buyer persona with a buyer persona template. There are many free options available such as these ones from HubSpot and Canva.

Example of a Buyer Persona: Photo courtesy of SEMrush

Depending on your industry and your businesses goals, the information in your buyer persona can vary. However, they often include the following criteria:

   • Picture of the Customer

   • Bio 

   • Motivations (goals)

   • Frustrations (pain points) 

   • Communication Channels

   • Favorite Brands 

   • Interests

   • Demographics

As your business evolves and your audience changes, your buyer persona(s) should be re-visited and updated accordingly so that they continue to reflect your ‘ideal’ customer.

Targeting  

Now that your target audience has been identified and you’ve gained a good understanding of them, it’s time to start the targeting process.

This process involves choosing a segment or segments that you’ve identified and engaging with or ‘targeting’ them.

Dart hitting bulls’ eye: Photo courtesy of Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

There are four ways that you can choose to target an audience depending on your desired outcome:

1) Undifferentiated (Mass) Marketing: Ironically, this strategy doesn’t really involve ‘targeting’ at all. Instead, you are marketing to everybody.  

Pros: Can be cost effective to produce goods and create content for everyone

Cons: Risk of increased competition and over-exposure, can be expensive to target everyone, customers don’t feel special

2) Differentiated (Segmented) Marketing: This is when a brand chooses 2 or more potentially valuable market segments and then creates unique marketing plans for each of them.

Pros: People usually respond well to personalization, low risk of overexposure to customers, more brand loyalty

Cons: Higher marketing and advertising costs, more time and energy necessary to create multiple unique plans

3) Concentrated (Niche) Marketing: This is when a brand concentrates all their marketing efforts on one very specific segment of the market.

Pros: high brand loyalty, low cost, high personalization, reduces competition

Cons: smaller customer base, highly influenced by niche-specific trends

4) Micromarketing: This strategy is very similar to niche marketing but is even more specified, focusing on targeting specific individuals within a niche market. An example of a brand that uses this type of marketing strategy is Groupon.

Pros: Highly personalized, customizable,

Cons: Higher cost per acquisition, limited reach, resource intensive

Positioning  

This is the last step involved in delivering your marketing strategy to your target audience. So far, you’ve identified your audience and decided which targeting strategy you will use to engage with them.

Now it’s time to start ‘positioning’ or, making your brand stand out from your competitors.  

Start by creating a product positioning map to see where your brand exists in relation to your competitors based on the following criteria:

1) Product Features or Benefits

2) Price

3) Quality

4) Product use or Application

5) Differentiation from Competition

After completing the product positioning map, you should be able to identify any relevant market gaps or opportunities that you want to take advantage of.

Just be aware that these gaps sometimes exist for good reasons and trying to position yourself favourably in relation to them may not be the most effective strategy.

Starbucks coffee cup: Image courtesy of Erik Mclean on Unsplash

So far you have identified your target audience through segmentation, chosen a targeting strategy to engage with that audience, and then discovered opportunities to differentiate your product/service from your competitors through positioning.

If all these steps are done properly, I can guarantee that your audience will be much more receptive to your marketing efforts, and, in turn, you will see more brand loyalty and sales than ever before.

If you have any questions about targeting, segmentation, positioning, or any other digital marketing topics, feel free to reach out to me!