Defining the target audience or target is very important when starting any project, although sometimes we overlook it, we should not make the mistake of ignoring it. As marketing professionals, we understand that a fundamental pillar for any action we wish to carry out. In other words, being clear about who we are targeting is the basis of our project and the guide of our digital marketing strategy.
Although they look the same, they are completely different. When we talk about target audience, we refer to that group of people that we want our actions to reach, whether it is a campaign on Facebook or Google Ads. With the main objective of achieving what we all want, the desired conversion. However, when we talk about potential clients, we refer to those people who could become clients, but in the future.
In short, to make it clearer than water, the target audience is the one that we are clear that they are clients, while the potential client is the one that could be later on.
Where is my target?
Knowing our target audience is essential in the world of Digital Marketing, first of all to understand them better and, above all, to be able to offer exactly what they demand.
Now, how do we define it? Pay close attention to this definitive guide to get the most out of your target audience:
Collect information from your audience:
The first step is very simple, the first thing you should do is delve into your database, who your customers are.
What data do we need to extract from our audience?
- Age: let’s not go crazy with this, knowing which generation they belong to or placing them in an age range is enough.
- Location: being clear about where they are is key, as we can adapt our strategies based on it.
- Language: just as location is essential, determining the language is also essential, in order to adapt our actions to them.
- Interests: we must not forget that despite being our audience and wanting them to buy from us, our target has other interests in addition to our brand. We would have to determine what they are and adapt our communication in order to increase our success rate.
- By purchase intention: how do they search for us? What channels do they use? Determining the way our public finds us is a differentiating factor to achieve our goals.
- Analyze social media
Social networks are a very useful tool to complement our customer database, as it will also help you further define the target audience. - Don’t lose sight of your competition
Evaluating and observing how your competition acts could help you to better define your target, and also to determine if both you and your competitors are pursuing the same objective.
Do not forget that when you analyze your competition, you will check if it has reached a market segment that you considered not very relevant and see what strategies have been used to reach that market niche.
- Value offered by your product or service
We cannot reach our public if we are not clear about the differentiating value that we offer, or what is the same, what is it that your product offers that makes it different from the rest.
Defining the benefits of your product or service will also help you find your target audience.
- A/B test
You learn from mistakes, right? Or at least that’s what they say. Test your actions by performing A/B tests to determine which of your strategies best suits your target audience.
Remember that when launching the message you must be very clear about the objective, the content, or the idea that you want to convey and of course the language. And one more thing, do not forget to choose the most appropriate medium to launch your campaign.
Once everything is up and running, one of the most important parts remains, that of monitoring the action and assessing the results obtained.
Update target audience data
You have to put all your efforts into analyzing the results obtained since you started defining your target.
Think that you now have very valuable information and thanks to it, you will be able to make all the necessary changes at the audience level and even at the product or service level.
As in life, everything changes, and your target audience was not going to be less, therefore, you have to make sure you keep your indicators updated.
It’s time to segment your target audience
You thought it was over, right? Sorry to tell you no, pay attention! Once you have the mentioned data, we can segment our audience.
Segmenting the audience will help you to be much more precious in your digital strategy, since you will direct your message to the right people.
How, when and why? This is precisely what segmentation responds to.
Another advantage offered by segmenting the audience is that of offering unique experiences. We live in the midst of a digital boom, the long-awaited brand loyalty and fidelity sounds almost like a utopia, so adapting our messages to each client will give us that extra bonus, because there is nothing better than being treated like someone special.
These are the criteria used in advertising agencies to segment the audience:
- Demographic segmentation: criteria such as age, gender, income level, social class or studies, any trait that helps us define your audience.
- Psychographic segmentation: according to your personality, attitudes, emotions or purchase intentions. All this will provide us with purchase Insights. We can obtain this data through interviews, surveys or the client’s own data.
- Lifestyle targeting: Here we talk about reference groups or use of your free time.
- Belief segmentation: we refer to the religious or political beliefs and values of the public in question.
- Segmentation by generations: we live in a time where generation X, generation Y, millennials and generation Z coexist… What a mess! So it is important to know how to give a different approach to the messages in order to reach each one of them.
- Geographic segmentation: country, province, city, address… everything you can find out about your audience could be very useful.
- Behavioral segmentation: we talk about the nature of the purchase, brand loyalty, level of use.
- Segmentation by benefit: the benefit is the use of the product or service and the satisfaction obtained by the public.
In search of the ideal client? The Buyer person is your solution.
The buyer persona embodies the perfect prototype of your brand’s ideal client. Because yes, the ideal client exists.
Surely you wonder, is a buyer persona the same as a target audience? Unlike the target audience, the buyer persona is a segmentation based on the need that your product or service tries to cover in certain situations. You could say that it is the representation of a person taken to the extreme, in which we define the following aspects:
- Profile
- Demographics
- Habits
- Challenges
- Interests
- Frustrations
- Objectives
Author Bio
Sarah Watson is an economist and content writer currently employed with DigitalStrategyOne, who loves tech, digital marketing, and online games. She’s a passionate blogger expressing herself through her creative and informative articles about online marketing strategies.
