“Everyone” Isn’t a Target Audience

Introduction

When it comes to digital marketing, one of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is creating a target audience that is bigger than they can handle. Allow me to explain. A friend of mine has a small business. In requesting some marketing help I asked them, “Now, who is your target audience?” Their response, “everyone.” That’s a marketer’s worst nightmare. I hate to break it to you, but “everyone” isn’t a target audience.” In fact, when you target everyone, you’re targeting no one.

Keep in mind that targeting on each social platform and that different people are attracted to different platforms. As I explain further, determine what social platform will work for you and your company. Social media targeting isn’t a “one size fits all” strategy. The goal is to create, gather information, optimize and repeat over and over until you get your desired results. The thing is, you’re never going to be done. Optimization is key to being better than average.  

Determine Your Target Audience

Once you have established your business you need to think about future clients. Who will want your products or services? How will you reach them? In order to sell effectively, you need to clearly identify who you want your buyers to be while considering why they need your product in their lives.

Social Media Platforms’ Audiences

Each social channel is going to have a different audience (usually with some overlap), which is to your company’s advantage. It’s important to know who to target and how to reach them. Sprout Social gives great insights on the user demographic on each of the following social platforms.

Facebook

Having over 2 billion monthly active users, there’s a lot of data regarding who is on Facebook. There’s a good chance that the audience you’re looking for is going to be found here. According to 2018 statistics:

? 88% of people from ages 13-17 use Facebook 

? 84% of people from ages 18-29 use Facebook 

? 72% of people from ages 30-49 use Facebook 

? 62% of people from ages 50-64 use Facebook 

? 62% of people from ages 65+ use Facebook 

There is a wide array of users, making Facebook one of the most ideal places to find and target your audience. Throughout the years, Facebook has added features, allowing people to optimize their profiles which gives businesses even more information to target.

Instagram

I might go as far as to say that Instagram is the young man’s game. The audience on this app is generally younger, emphasizing photos and videos. Smartphones are common amongst the younger generation, making this social platform perfect for those with 24/7 access to the internet and high-quality phone photos. Statistics show that:

72% of people from ages 13-17 use Instagram 

64% of people from ages 18-29 use Instagram 

40% of people from ages 30-49 use Instagram 

21% of people from ages 50-64 use Instagram 

10% of people from ages 65+ use Instagram

Facebook has a gradual decrease as the age of the user increases whereas Instagram is a significant decrease once the age of users hits about 30. Part of the reasoning behind this is because Instagram isn’t designed for desktop - Facebook is. In order to drive more traffic towards their app, they’ve made their desktop version much less user-friendly. 

If you want to find a young, visual audience, Instagram is a great platform to utilize.

Twitter

Though a significantly fewer number of people use Twitter, it’s still a great social platform to use. Currently growing, I’d say that one of the best uses for Twitter as of now is to create brand awareness. Running ads on it and targeting an audience might not be useful though due to how few people use it regularly. It is one of the last social platforms that uses a chronological feed (a tweet’s shelf-life is around 15-minutes or so). The largest audience on Twitter comes from 18-29 year olds, and stats say that 40% of the people in that age group use Twitter.

Snapchat

With 69% of 13-17 year-olds and 68% of 18-29 year-olds on Snapchat, this social platform is another great way to reach a younger audience. The percentage of people aged 30+ on Snapchat is significantly less, making it less effective at targeting that specific age group. Snapchat is yet another platform based solely on photos and videos so pay attention to the content you’re sharing. It should be captivating and fast-paced. 

LinkedIn

Another growing platform, LinkedIn, is specifically marketed towards professionals, which makes it unique. The platform’s purpose is different than others. LinkedIn is designed for professional networking. Those looking to grow their personal networks utilize this platform for professional purposes. Resumes, work experience, articles, etc. are all options for content to be posted. Though it may have few users right now, it’s a platform with some of the most potential for growth. It’s starved for content, making the shelf-life of posts longer than any other social platform.

As of 2018, here are the percentages of users that are on LinkedIn:

? 29% of people from ages 18-29 use LinkedIn 

? 33% of people from ages 30-49 use LinkedIn

? 24% of people from ages 50-64 use LinkedIn 

? 9% of people from ages 65+ use LinkedIn

The user percentages are low, but I see LinkedIn as an opportunity to create a presence before there is a presence. Building your network now and establishing your business or yourself is one of the things that will benefit you in the future when others hop on board the bandwagon.

Personas

A persona should represent who your ideal customer is. Personas allow a business to visualize their target customer, allowing them to personalize a marketing strategy towards them. By creating a buyer persona, a business can gain insight into how to properly attract and relate to their customer segments. Creating 6-10 personas will assist in marketing efforts and help save time and money

Demographics

What does your target market look like? Think of little details that may help you to market your company. Think of the following when considering the demographics of your audience:

• Age. What age group would most utilize what you’re selling? What age group would purchase your product or use your service? 
• Gender. Which gender is most likely to be interested? Men? Women? Do women purchase this item for men or vice versa?
• Educational Background. What does your audience look like when it comes to education? Will they ideally have a Bachelor’s degree? 
• Economic Status. Take into consideration the price of what you’re selling and from that, determine who will be able to purchase it. If your product costs thousands of dollars, you’ll most likely want to target someone with a higher household income who can afford it.
• Career. What kind of job field does your ideal customer work in? Is there a specific industry that would best benefit from your product or service? Are you targeting stay-at-home moms?
• Device. Consider the type of device your audience is most likely to use. Understanding this will help you when creating digital ads.

Psychographics

Demographics are important, but don’t forget to consider psychographics too. Psychographics can not only help you better determine who to target, but also assist in gaining more insight into the minds of your consumers. Defining different psychographics of an audience can help you learn how your consumers think, which will then make it easier for you to market towards their thoughts and behaviors.

Consider these when getting into the mind of your audience:

• Personality. What type of personality traits do you want to market to? For example, are you looking for people who are more outgoing or reserved?
• Values. It’s important to find an audience who values the same things your company does. 
• Opinions. Seek those who share similar opinions as your company, who advocate for the same things. This will help create a good, target audience. Those who differ in opinions can provide value as well. 
• Interests/Hobbies. Marketing towards people with specific interests or hobbies that are related to your service is another tactful way to find your audience.

Geographic Location

Consider your location when creating a target audience. To determine the best audience to purchase your product, look at the type of people in your location. People in small towns will naturally behave differently than a people from large city and vice versa. The culture is different and will vary from city to city. Consider the cost of what you’re offering and the type of income level that will be able to afford it - does your business location match?

There are cultural aspects to consider. What languages should be targeted? There could be a large population of Spanish speakers in your area, which might determine if you’ll want to run a Spanish campaign.

Behavior

Understanding how people behave online will help when you’re creating your target audience. Here are a few more things to look at when finding your target market.

• Purchase History. If you already have data, this would be a great KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to look at. Check when most purchases are made. Whatever conclusion is made, you gain a better insight into knowing when users are purchasing from you.
• Website Habits. In addition to seeing where the money is being spent, another great tactic to see behavior is tracking where traffic is coming from and when (what days and times) your site or social channels receive the most traffic.
• Frequency. How often are your consumers re-visiting your website? Evaluating returning and new customers will help to determine your targeting strategy. 

Negative Personas

Getting into the mind of your audience is important, but what about understanding the audience you don’t want to target? Creating 2-3 negative personas can help you know who you don’t want to target in your advertising. A slight change in a demographic or psychographic could make all the difference in successful targeting. By creating even just a few negative personas, you’ll be saving yourself time later.

Look at possible “red flags” in a customer. Who wouldn’t your brand fit? I’ve found negative personas to be extremely helpful because at times it’s easier to think about who you don’t want purchasing your product or service than who you want. This then opens up more brainstorming to who you actually want to target.

Using Data to See Your Current Audience

Deciding who your target audience is, is only one part of the picture. What does the data say? You might be surprised what you find in your analytics about who your current audience actually is. Think of it like this: Most of the time you have your set shopping list, but then when you get to Target… everything changes, right? You see things you didn’t even know you needed. 

Google Analytics can help you better understand you current audience. The data can show you an audience that you may not have expected would be interested, or you may see that you’re targeting the wrong people. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics has a sea of information. Without knowing exactly where to look, it’s easy to get lost. Using the Google Analytics Demo Account, I’ll walk through various places where you’ll be able to find important aspects of who your audience is. I also suggest enrolling in the Google Analytics for Beginners Course for additional information!

As you log into Google Analytics you’ll have options on the left-hand side to view various sections. If data interests you, then this is the place for you to spend your time. Keep in mind the date range in the upper right-hand corner. Analytics will automatically use data within the past week, but you can adjust the date range. There’s also an option to compare data from a previous period, which is helpful when tracking growth and progression from previous months, quarters, years, etc. For this walk-through, I’ve chosen to use the date range January 1, 2019 - June 30, 2019.

Audience Overview

Audience overview gives you a bird's eye view of what is happening on your website. From this, you can see the number of users and sessions your site has had. This summary shows you new users vs. returning users, bounce rate, sessions, and more. 

The graph represents the new users over the quarter. Analytics also has the option to change the metric you’re seeing to different options such as average session duration, bounce rate, new users, etc. I’ve included an image below to show the different options available.

The key to data analysis is trying to figure out the story behind the numbers. Figuring out the “why,” is one of the hardest things to do. It takes time and practice, but is necessary in order to move forward with further best practices.

Demographics Overview

The demographics overview shows you the gender and age of your audience. Additionally, men and women respond to different marketing tactics. Knowing what gender is more likely to be interested in what you’re selling will affect things like branding and presentation. 

There are further drop downs available that take you more in-depth to the age and gender of the audience. They go further by providing a data visualization as well as a breakdown of each age and gender with the acquisition and behavior of both.

Age

The graph showing age has options to view the data from the date range in days, weeks, or months. Looking at this sample data, I’d be interested to see what that large jump in February was and why on that day we received so many new users compared to the previous days. 

Google Analytics provides the ability to see what age group contributed to different aspects of your data. When you are given more data, you have more of the story and can, therefore, come to conclusions as to what happened and how to proceed.

Looking at this data, you get insight into the age group most likely to purchase and how much in sales were made from them. I find it interesting that although people in the 25-34 age range had the most transactions, they had one of the lowest conversion rates.

Gender

There is also a breakdown by gender in Google Analytics. This allows you to see how much revenue was generated by gender. If it’s significant enough, then changes might want to be made. We see here though that even though half of the users are female, they bring in just as much revenue as males do. This could be because women shop for men or that many receptionists are female and are responsible for orders within a company.   

Digitally, you can target just about anything. If only males are purchasing from you, then don’t target both males and females. You’ll only be wasting money on an audience that isn’t likely to buy. 

Interests Overview

This overview gives us a glimpse into the interests of consumers. Google is constantly collecting data from you such as your search habits, and therefore knows what you like. Although this should be taken with a grain of salt, this can be insightful when creating ads. Interest-based marketing can be effective, but I’ve found that adding a few interests helps an already, well-targeted campaign. 

Language

Knowing what language people speak is crucial. If you notice a significant amount of users speaking a language other than what you’re targeting, you may want to consider running ads in a different language. This is a decision that I would choose very carefully, though. 

The date range I’ve chosen makes it clear that most of the users and purchases come from the United States. This could be different for you though. Let’s say that you notice a significant number of purchases coming from Chinese speakers. If so it may be worthwhile to test Chinese ads to see how they perform. When in doubt, test it out. 

Behavior

Comparing new and returning visitors on a website can be valuable. Google considers someone a new visitor when they visits your site for the first time or use a new, different device. Google defines a returning visitor as anyone who re-visits the same site within two years. Google is working on a way to prevent users from counting more than once if they’re using different devices. They can track the same user on different devices if both devices are logged into Google Chrome, but they haven’t released a way to track from different browsers. 

This information can prove useful to see if the content your website provides is relevant to those visiting the site. Traffic can come from a variety of channels such as social, direct, organic, etc. and this metric can help see how well your efforts in other aspects of digital marketing are impacting your website traffic. You can learn more about you website’s visitor’s online behavior by paying close attention to returning visitors.

Conclusion

Targeting truly is the heart of marketing. It’s what drives everything. When your targeting is off, it can derail the success of your marketing. No pressure, right? The joy of digital marketing is the fact that things can be changed, tested, and tracked. Be aware of the social channel you’re using and what audience is on that platform. As you create personas and get into the mind of the consumer, you will be able to better raise awareness of what you’re promoting. Remember, as you gain a better understanding of people, you’ll be able to market to them better. Keep in mind that behind every number there’s a person. Be conscious of who they are and what they like. After reading this, you should be able to breakdown your audience and know that “everyone,” isn’t a target audience. 

Digital marketing is a growing world - one that is constantly evolving and improving. We have the technology now to do more than we’ve ever been able to do, and we have to take advantage of that.