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Imagine a marketing campaign targeted to the masses with no consideration towards audience interest and demographics. Do you think your marketing campaign will be more effective if you target a larger population of people, or a smaller, more specific group of consumers?
If you’re a relatively small business with a limited marketing budget, then targeting a more specific audience is probably the better option. With that being said, even if you can target everyone in the world, how many of them will remember your brand after the marketing campaign?
As a brand/business, it’s important to define your target audience. Your target audience refers to a specific group of consumers who are most likely to purchase your products or services. This is the audience you should be targeting in your marketing campaigns and can be identified and segmented using various factors like demographics and psychographics.
In this article, we’ll be highlighting the importance of defining your target audience and taking you through some of the tools you can use to better define your target audience.
A study conducted by Harvard Business claimed that in the US, 85% of 30,000 new product launches failed because of poor market segmentation.
Since your target audience forms the core of your customer base, they hold significant influence over your marketing strategy. As such, you should be focusing your marketing efforts on your target audience.
Once you identify your target audience, you can create marketing personas that represent the various demographics/psychographics in your target audience (and create marketing strategies tailored to each persona).
For example, if you were a business selling cars in Singapore, one of your marketing personas could be “Family Fred”, an individual between the ages of 35 and 45, with family/business-related interests and a monthly income of S$5,000 and above.
Marketing strategy aside, your target audience is also a big factor to consider in your business decisions. (products/services you should be providing) Did you realise how McDonald’s menu items vary between countries? Based on different consumer tastes and preferences, McDonald’s creates special menu items that are unique to a country. In Hong Kong, McDonald’s serves macaroni soup (a traditional Hong Kong breakfast item) in their breakfast menu; demonstrating a good understanding of their Hong Kong audience and their ability to adjust their products accordingly.
Audiences can be segmented based on their demographic and psychographic. Demographics are based on factors like age, gender, income, education, etc. Psychographics are based on psychological aspects like interests, beliefs, habits, etc. Once you have segmented your audiences, you are ready to analyse them.
Now that we have segmented your audience, the next step is to analyze them. Here are a few tools that you can use when analyzing your audience:
Google has 2 services that allow you to better understand your audience: Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Google Analytics, allows you to see who has visited your website and also breaks them down into their demographics, interests, and their behaviour on your site. This information is important as it helps you to find out who you should be targeting and segment them accordingly.
Looking into the keywords that your audience is searching for is also helpful to your business. This gives you a better idea of their interests and needs - allowing you to have a better understanding of how to better target your audience.
Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) lets you run ads on Google’s search engine (search engine marketing) and provides useful data such as impressions, reach, clicks and conversions. Google Ads lets you define the audience you want to target (based on interests) and the specific keywords you’d like to run (i.e. running ads on “video production” if you’re a video production company).
From this data, you can get a better idea of the type of content, messaging and visuals that best work for your audience.
Similar to Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager lets you run ads on Facebook/Instagram, where they provide data of clicks, reach, impressions for your media buy campaigns. The platform also allows you to A/B test your ads, allowing you to compare between two ad variants to see which one does better with your audience.
Ubersuggest is a free online tool that provides keyword suggestions and content ideas that people are searching for on Google. It allows you to search for keywords that are doing well and also analyze how your competitors are doing as well. Giving you a good gauge of what keywords to include in your content that your audience might be searching for.
Using primary research methods can be beneficial too, as it gives you more nuanced and in-depth data on your target audience that may not be possible through online channels. Methods that you can use would be conducting surveys, interviews or focus group discussions. These methods focus more on the insights of the consumer’s decision-making process and their attitudes, as compared to just data and numbers.
Remember, it’s not about the quantity, but rather the quality of your audience that matters. You don’t have to reach every consumer in the market; rather you should be focusing on your target audience who are more likely to convert and purchase your product/service. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to define your audience before you start your marketing campaign and focus your strategy on reaching a said audience.
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