Identifying your target audience
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In the previous article we talked about Market Research. In this article we will be going through how to identify the target audience.
Knowing your customers is important for any business model—including e-commerce. One way to get to know your customers better is to research your target audience, or the group of people most likely to purchase your company’s products. We already learned about market research and now it’s time to consider the specific steps you can take to identify your target audience.
Use insights from market research
The information you gather through market research can help you understand what types of customers are most likely to be interested in buying your products or services.
To identify your target audience, you’ll need information about your customers’ demographics, and their personal characteristics. If you don’t have enough information on your potential customers, you may need to do additional market research.
There are a lot of other questions you could ask about your customers besides the ones mentioned in this reading. You’ll need to choose the questions that are most relevant to your company’s goals and the products or services you sell.
You can gather this type of information using surveys, interviews, analytics, and other methods.
Demographics
These are some examples of demographic information you might gather to learn more about your potential customers:
Personal characteristics
It’s also helpful to ask questions that provide insight into the customer’s personal characteristics, and their goals and barriers.
Here are some examples of questions you might ask about the customer’s behavior:
Here are some examples of questions you might ask about the customer’s interests, hobbies, lifestyle, and values, or what’s important to them:
Here are some examples of questions you might ask about the customer’s goals and barriers:
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Analyze existing customers
Another step in identifying your target audience is to analyze the data you have for existing customers. For example, Google Analytics includes demographic information for visitors on your site, including their location, gender, interests, age, and language. You may also be able to access customer data within the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, which is software that helps a business manage and monitor its interactions with existing and potential customers. CRM systems, such as Salesforce, collect data about a company’s customers.
Customer reviews and comments can also give you a better idea of who your target audience is. For example, you could review comments posted on the company’s social media accounts, read online chat transcripts from the customer service team, or browse product reviews written by customers.
To gather more information from your existing and potential customers, you could create a survey and post it on your website or social media accounts, or send it to your email subscribers. Offering an incentive to complete the survey might increase the response rate.
Identify patterns
Once you have enough data about your existing and potential customers, you’ll need to organize the data and search for trends. Using a spreadsheet can help you organize, sort, and filter data to discover the main characteristics shared by a group of customers.
For example, the spreadsheet below organizes a company’s data by the name, age, location, household, education, and main concern of their customers. Based on the data in the age column, most of this company’s customers are in their 20s and 30s.
Although all companies have at least one target audience, it’s common for companies to have more than one target audience. This is especially true for companies that sell a variety of products or services.
It’s important to avoid excluding a group of customers just because their characteristics don’t match the majority of your customers. This smaller group of customers can be an important target audience for your company to consider.
Describe your target audience
After you’ve researched your existing and potential customers and identified patterns, you can begin to describe the groups of customers you’ve discovered.
The custom suits retailer used as an example in a video describes their target audience in this way:
The custom suits retailer also identified another target audience made up of a smaller but significant group of customers. They describe this target audience as follows:
Reaching your target audience
Now that the custom suits retailer has identified the groups of customers in their target audience, they can use this information to make better marketing and advertising decisions. For example, they might choose to include product images on their website that feature women and non-binary people wearing custom suits instead of just men. They might also include a measuring guide that applies to all genders. Plus, they might shift their advertising budget to spend more on the social media sites or other channels that their customers use frequently.
Key takeaways
Identifying your target audience helps you understand who your customers are and how to reach them more effectively. You can identify your target audience by using insights from market research, analyzing your existing customers, identifying patterns, and describing the groups of customers that make up your target audience.