Determining your target audience for a research project is a crucial step in any marketing operation. It helps you focus your research objectives, design your research methods, and analyze your research results. But how do you identify and segment your target audience effectively? Here are some tips to guide you through the process.
Before you start looking for your target audience, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your research project. What is the main problem or opportunity you want to explore? What are the specific questions you want to answer? What are the expected outcomes and benefits of your research? Having a well-defined research purpose will help you narrow down your potential audience and avoid wasting time and resources on irrelevant or unrealistic segments.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of the type of customer who is most likely to benefit from your product or service, and who you want to target with your marketing efforts. Your ICP should include demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and firmographic characteristics that distinguish your ideal customer from others. You can use various sources of data to create your ICP, such as your existing customer base, your competitors, your industry trends, and your market research. Your ICP will help you segment your target audience and prioritize the most relevant and profitable segments.
One effective to way to identify and sketch out the Ideal Customer Profile in the online age can be to map out a digital footprint. A few questions that we always tried to answer while understanding the target audience are: What does a day in the 'digital' life of this person look like? What apps do they check when they wake up in the morning? Is there an app they use to commute at work, what is it they do on the way (listen to music, what do those providers look like.) While no two customers will have the exact same digital footprint, mapping out this day in the life has helped us understand not just the preferences of the customer but opened up interesting ideas and strategies for collaborations and cross selling.
Vague or broad definitions of your target audience make it difficult to target and market effectively. If you don't know exactly who you want to target, it's difficult to develop appropriate messages. This requires a precise definition of the target group, as the lack of precision can lead to a waste of resources. The key challenge is to strike the right balance by creating a clear but not too narrow definition of your target audience, understanding their needs, and making sure your marketing strategy is effective.
Segmentation is the process of dividing your target audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics, needs, preferences, or behaviors. Segmentation allows you to tailor your research methods and messages to different segments and increase your research efficiency and effectiveness. There are many ways to segment your target audience, such as geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, or attitudinal segmentation. You can also use a combination of segmentation methods to create more specific and meaningful segments. For example, you can use geographic and demographic segmentation to create a segment of young urban professionals, and then use psychographic and behavioral segmentation to further divide them into lifestyle or purchase behavior sub-segments.
Once you have segmented your target audience, you need to validate and refine your segments to ensure they are viable and actionable. You can use various criteria to evaluate your segments, such as size, growth, accessibility, profitability, and compatibility. You can also use qualitative and quantitative research methods to test your segments and gather feedback from potential customers. For example, you can use surveys, interviews, focus groups, or online forums to validate your segments' needs, preferences, and expectations. You can also use experiments, trials, or pilot tests to refine your segments' responses and behaviors. Based on your validation and refinement results, you can adjust or eliminate some segments, or create new ones.
Your research sample is the subset of your target audience that you will actually contact and collect data from for your research project. Your research sample should be representative of your target audience and large enough to provide reliable and valid results. You can use various sampling methods to select your research sample, such as random, stratified, cluster, or convenience sampling. You can also use different sampling techniques, such as online, phone, mail, or face-to-face sampling. You should consider your research objectives, budget, time, and resources when choosing your sampling methods and techniques.
Your target audience is not static, but dynamic and evolving. Therefore, you need to monitor and update your target audience regularly to keep up with the changes in their characteristics, needs, preferences, and behaviors. You can use various tools and methods to monitor and update your target audience, such as analytics, feedback, reviews, surveys, or social media. You should also review and revise your research purpose, ICP, segments, and sample periodically to ensure they are still relevant and accurate. By doing so, you can maintain and improve your research quality and impact.
While emphasizing the purpose of research is important, it is only part of the equation. The real challenge lies in choosing the right methods to achieve those goals. A clear purpose alone does not guarantee successful targeting.