Where does every business start? From the client. Do you already know who will want to buy your product or use your services? In this article, you will learn how to define the target audience.
Target audience: what is it and when is it
The target audience(TA) is a user group that is targeted by some promotional activities, in which advertisers are interested and / or who is interested in any information.
The target audience is the people who satisfy the need that your product or service solves.
Imagine that you started building a house before doing a soil analysis. So it is with the analysis of the target audience:
Ignorance of your target audience entails either a complete failure of the product on the market, or, which is most often found in practice, a significant increase in budgets for the creation and promotion of the product.
Example: The owner of the business spent a lot of money on leaflets and business cards, which were stupidly scattered around the area or at the entrances. There were few phone calls. Advertising costs were not justified.
Find out who needs the services of a make-up artist on the road more often than others.
After analyzing the target audience, such portraits of clients appeared as:
- brides and their mothers
- women on maternity leave
- residents of outlying areas of the city
We established interaction with large wedding salons, left information in kindergartens and schools for teachers and parents, opened a salon group on the Vkontakte social network.
The chosen strategy for promoting the salon in terms of interaction with its target audience contributed to the quality feedback in the Internet.
After a few months of work, it turned out that the salon group on the Vkontakte social network brings in most of the clients. At the exit, this was confirmed by the masters themselves, fixing the answers of the clients. Abandoned contextual advertising, focused on the social network "Vkontakte".
It was also decided to create a separate page for the salon administrator, since this method of communication was noted as more convenient for clients.
Types of target audience
In modern marketing practice, the following types of target audience are distinguished:
1. main and indirect. The main audience makes the decision to buy, it is the initiator of the action, in contrast to the indirect one. Naturally, it will be a priority for us.
Example: the main audience of children's toys is children, and their mothers are an indirect audience. Although mothers carefully inspect products for defects or safety of use, moreover, they pay for the purchase and are its initiators.
2. Wide and narrow CA. It's clear from the name. Example: tea lovers - a wide audience, lovers of white fruit tea - a narrow one.
3. Well, a classic example - audience by type of target group. Target audience in business (B2B) and individual consumption (B2C).
You can also single out the target audience by the purpose of visiting the site:
- Target audience interested in the content of the site (visitors come for information),
- Visitors who are interested in the products and services of the site for subsequent purchase.
Where to dig? We get information
You can get data about the target audience using:
- questioning;
- interviewing;
- surveys.
Try to interview as many respondents as possible or conduct a survey of opinion leaders.
Remember that there is a “voicing minority” on forums and blogs, their opinions need to be carefully collected and analyzed: they form the image of the product. However, it should be taken into account that the statements of the "vociferous minority" may not coincide with the opinion of the "silent majority" purchasing goods or services.
Case in point: The cartoon-style release of Diablo 3 was outrageous for game veterans, but in August 2015, Activision Blizzard announced that the game had sold over 30 million copies.
Advantages:
- Easily segment your audience
- Lots of answers from interviewees
- Minimum investment funds,
- It doesn't take a lot of time.
When mining data, always look for reasons and a reason for consuming a product. It is necessary to accurately represent the nature of your consumer.
Example: A survey about possible reasons to have a snack helped distinguish Nestle in such a segment of the target audience as “depressed chocolate lovers”, who prefer to buy sweets in expensive boxes. The new candy promotion strategy increased sales and reduced promotion costs by narrowing the audience.
It is important to interview the so-called “buyers”: for example, when buying children's furniture, men's trousers or shirts, women are also included in the target audience, since they are more often the ones who make the decision to buy.
Client portrait: what is the use
Based on the client profile, you will be able to:
1. Create marketing campaigns (advertising, commercial offers, content, etc.).
2. Formulate a competent offer: find out the problem of customers and promise to solve it.
3. Work out the benefits of the consumer, draw up a USP.
4. Identify triggers to influence and motivate the client.
5. Find out the main channels of promotion on the Internet, for example, using the matching index (more on that later).
The more details in the portrait, the more characteristics it takes into account, the higher the chance to create an offer that best meets the needs of your target audience.
Segmenting the target market with 5W
1. What (what) - a description of the specific properties of the goods / services;
2. Who (who) - a characteristic of a potential client;
3. Why (why) - what guides the consumer when choosing a product or service;
4. When (when) - the time of the purchase;
5. Where (where) - the place of sale of goods / services.
Example:
Segmenting the audience:
- turnkey house construction,
- Interior and exterior decoration of the house,
- Conducting a water supply system,
- plumbing installation,
- Installation of heating equipment,
- Roofing houses.
- A family dreaming of their own home
- Family willing to improve accommodations,
- A young family who wants to live apart from their parents
- family with children,
- Family wishing to move out of town
- Family of working pensioners.
Why?
- The speed of construction or the provision of related services,
- Opportunity to save money
- Opportunity to find good builders,
- Opportunity to see project documentation and preliminary calculations
- Opportunity to receive services in the complex (turnkey),
- The ability to evaluate the work performed (portfolio),
- Availability of a guarantee for work,
- Conclusion of a contract.
When?
- After having heard good feedback From friends,
- During the season of discounts and promotions,
- Website,
- Vkontakte community",
- Landing.
Use the technique of multiple segmentation - work with the entire market, but taking into account the differences between segments.
You should have portraits of real customers with certain types of behavior when buying a service or product.
Example:
Based on the analysis of all members of the Vkontakte group, the portrait of the client in the group-community of copywriters:
Collected manually or automatically, target audience data will allow you to determine the right promotion strategy. Let's take a closer look at the basic parameters for segmentation.
Characteristics to describe the target audience
The definition of the target audience may depend on the following parameters:
- geographical,
- demographic,
- Socio-economic,
- psychographic,
- Features of behavior.
Geolocation: what area are you from, kid?
Location information allows us to show the product only to residents of the specified location. Geolocation also allows us to anticipate customer needs.
Example: it is cold in Novosibirsk, so the demand for down jackets will be clearly higher than for surfboards.
Whose will you be, serf? Demographic characteristics
Needs and preferences, as well as the intensity of consumption of goods, are very often closely related precisely to demographic characteristics.
Demographic characteristics are easily measurable, unlike other segmentation criteria.
Variables: age, gender, nationality, presence of children and marital status.
Also, when segmenting the market according to demographic characteristics, it is worth considering the area in which a person works.
Example:
TA: main - girls from 6-12 years old, students elementary school, secondary - their mothers, usually married, of all nationalities.
The initial form of the announcement of recruitment to the studio school:
Changed after much discussion:
It was not possible to convince that the Vkontakte address is not needed. However, the responses appeared, thanks to the balloons!
Socio-economic: do you have money? And if I find
The characteristics of the consumer are considered: his employment, education, source and amount of income, which serves as the basis of purchasing power.
Example: teenagers - schoolchildren or students, dependent on parents, low income. Gift promotions for schoolchildren or discounts on student cards. "Show diary without triples and get a gift" as a marketing ploy.
Gender differences, age and capabilities of consumers affect the type of goods or services purchased.
However, consumer activity depends on psychological characteristics, which must also be taken into account when drawing up a consumer portrait.
Psychographic segmentation
A real Klondike for the study of Central Asia: lifestyle (a homebody or an adventurer on his own head), values, life principles, decision-making speed, the presence of idols to follow, fears, problems and dreams.
Knowing about a person's propensity for constant change, or vice versa, about his conservatism, you can make the text of the publication attractive to a specific group of consumers.
It is very important to understand the peculiarities of promoting a product or service in fan communities.
We often make purchases on an emotional level, under the influence of positive emotions, such as tenderness, a sense of nostalgia, the joy of recognition. Find out what your customers dream about or miss.
Those who believe, fly in, those who are greedy, run away: behavioral features
Behavioral segmentation of the market is the selection of those parameters that can describe the moment of choosing, making a purchase and using a product.
Some of them:
- What is the driving force behind the purchase: level of service, confirmation of status, opportunity to save money, price, speed of service, etc.;
- What is the reason to purchase a product / use a service: an everyday purchase or a special occasion;
- The nature of the client's expectations from the purchase of a product or service;
- How urgently you need to solve the problem - the degree of involvement in the purchase.
Here brand attitude- how it relates to the product: loyal, hostile, indifferent, etc.:
1. Loyal users: they know the brand, they buy the brand, they are absolutely loyal to the brand and do not switch to competitors;
2. Loyal users: know the brand, buy the brand, but sometimes buy other brands;
3. Weakly interested: know the brand but don't buy it;
4. Not interested: do not use and do not know.
Another indicator is How often do you buy a product/service, that is, the level of intensity of consumption of the product (frequency, experience of use, adaptation to the product).
An example of a table of the intensity of consumption of goods by group members
Aim and shoot: working with target audience
Creation of USP
After you draw portraits of target groups, take the time and effort to create separate ads, banners or landing pages for each target group. Create your unique selling proposition for them. This will be an exact hit on the bull's-eye.
If you make a USP for a narrow segment of the target audience, the conversion to target action will be higher!
Example:
Company selling heating equipment, water supply and sewerage.
Salon "Gidromontazh" carries out wholesale and retail sales heating equipment.
"Perform installation work, any complexity, heating systems, water supply and sewerage network. Drawing up projects, selection of equipment and consultations for FREE.
Key parameters are taken from the head and do not take into account real characters and their motivation for buying.
After analyzing the CA. The hypothesis - the middle class and above, they live in elite houses, an unlimited budget, they are running out of time, has been confirmed. After studying the target audience of adjacent groups, we make universal accents on the guarantee and quick installation:
"A heating boiler from Italian manufacturers is an excellent solution for a house with many water supply points."
Salon "Gidromontazh" - only certified equipment and high-quality components.
15 years in the service market. Quick installation of water supply systems in a private house: an experienced team of installers with their equipment in three days.
Affinity Index
The Matching Index helps to determine how a particular advertising channel matches the required target audience. It significantly affects the efficiency advertising campaign and the cost of contact with the target audience.
By comparing the "Affinity Index" with other indicators - visits, bounces, conversions - you can determine the preferences of visitors who convert the best.
From total number 10% of website visitors watched your video, and among women 11% watched this video, and only 7% among men. For women, the matching index is: 11/10*100=110. For men 7/10*100=70. In this case, we can say that this video fits the female audience more.
Target audience and promotion channels
Target audience - search robots. Selection of keywords and phrases, bringing the site in line with the requirements of search engines.
An incorrectly defined target audience will lead to errors in the list of key queries for search promotion.
Content Marketing
The topics of your content should be of interest to the target audience and be among the topics in which you are an expert.
A successful strategy does not mean that you have to produce viral content. You just have to be consistent and sincere with your clients.
Targeting allows you to work only with the target audience that has certain characteristics and show ads only to a selected group of people.
New Nielsen study: mobile ad targeting reaches its target in 60% of cases, more than half of mobile ad impressions from April to June in 2016 found their target audience. In 2015, coverage was only 49%.
Adapt the created content for different social networks.
When planning to launch a new ambitious startup, develop an existing one, or establish reliable reasons for the growth or decline in the profitability of an enterprise, it would be right to start with an analysis of the target audience. This will take a lot of work, but don't be afraid. With the right approach, this process will not take much time and will become the basis of long-term and sustainable success.
*rTarget audience research
A group of people who will spend their income on a product or service offered by a particular company - this is it. And, of course, not knowing them by sight is simply a crime.
Fact! The percentage of unaccounted, so-called random buyers or customers can reach up to 25%.
On the path to setting the truth, most entrepreneurs face two major obstacles:
- Lack of knowledge of target audience research methods and fear of its scope.
- Errors in the definition of "implicit" potential clients which can play a leading role in the success of your business.
Let's take a look at a few simple tricks that will minimize the risk of failure:
- Gather as much information as possible about who your potential buyer or client might be. If you do not have money for expensive research conducted by marketing and consulting agencies, then use the simplest, free and effective ways:
- Ask all your friends, relatives and acquaintances.
- Conduct mini-surveys on forums in social networks or in your own blog, the theme of which should correspond to the business idea.
- If this online business, then collect necessary information it is also possible through the “registration” block, most importantly, to correctly and unobtrusively include a sufficient number of criteria in it. To make it pleasant for people to spend time on this, be sure to offer them a good discount, gift or bonus on their first order.
Key questions to be answered by the study
- Who is my potential client? This issue includes gender, age, level of education and profession.
- What kind of life does he lead? For example, today's youth prefers to shop online or in branded boutiques, but this is for the premium class of goods. For the middle class, online shopping is seen as an opportunity to compare and choose the best combination of price and quality.
- A block of individual questions that is closely related to the services or products offered. For example, for the services of a tutor, it is of great importance: where the student studies, where he plans to enter, what level of progress he has, what income his parents have, and what goal the parents or children pursue when ordering this or that service. Such questions will help the teacher to adjust the curriculum, increase the number of positive and recommendations, which will undoubtedly play a good role in promoting the business.
Methods for analyzing the data obtained about the target audience
Having received the data, it is important not to miss the chance to correctly group and analyze them in order to fully understand the personal characteristics of a potential client. Knowing him “by sight”, you can make a unique offer that a person from this target group cannot refuse.
Important! The basis of the analysis is the allocation of the core of the target audience and the groups that it forms.
The core is that part of the target audience to which the entire business concept will be oriented.
The core of the target audience must fully comply with the general marketing strategy companies.
Before starting the analysis, it is necessary to perform a segmentation or clustering procedure for the audience, that is, to divide it into private subgroups united by common features.
In order to correctly segment, it is necessary to take into account dozens of factors, such as:
- contact history,
- social status,
- preference,
- education,
- income level,
- gender, age, etc.
Important! The more factors a marketer takes into account, the higher the value of the results obtained.
Often, electronic algorithms are used for segmentation, the description of which is widely presented on the Internet and in the subject literature:
- CLOPE,
- Kohonen maps,
- nearest neighbor method.
Separately, it is advised to consider potential clients in the b2b and b2c sectors, since approaches to working with physical and legal entities diametrically opposed. After all, when dealing with a specific person, we make an offer in which he is directly interested. It is impossible for a company to make a point proposal, because on the way to the main decision maker, we will have to go through many obstacles in the person of people who are often completely unmotivated to optimize a particular process in the enterprise.
Impact on the target audience
After segmenting the target audience to promote a service or product, you will need to develop. It will be based on an advertising campaign, which should be aimed at stimulating sales.
In this article, we will consider techniques for influencing and persuading potential customers. Let's take as a basis the theory of Dave Straker, who is the developer of most of these techniques and the creator of the changingminds.org website, popular in Europe and the USA, as well as the author of many books on similar topics.
Confidence Theory
Putting a confident tone into a thought, you give it the opportunity to penetrate the minds of other people as the only true and truthful one. If you say something with doubt, then you are unlikely to be believed.
Scarcity = promotion
The essence of this manipulation is as follows - goods or services become much more attractive to customers if they are informed that their quantity is limited or the period of a special offer is limited. An ad might say, for example, “All shoes are on sale at a 35% discount. The promotion is valid only during May 1!
Sleeper Technique
It is based on the fact that if commercial(or another type of message) for a potential client will not contain a direct indication of the purchase of a service, then he will gradually increase his loyalty to such advertising, and, accordingly, to the product.
Attention! For any industry and sector of the economy, these rules will remain relevant for many years, as they appeal to simple human needs for respect, leadership and communication.
conclusions
Analysis and further impact on the target audience is a complex and painstaking work that requires care and accuracy and, at the same time, creativity and innovative thinking. This is the only way to segment the target audience and direct, and indeed marketing in general, in the right direction.
Why is it necessary to draw up a portrait of the target audience when preparing an advertising campaign? To promote a product or service, it is extremely important to know your potential buyer as accurately as possible, otherwise advertising budget will fly out into the pipe without any recoil.
Without creating an imaginary image (avatar) of the target audience, it is impossible to determine a promotion strategy, make a clickable ad, a landing page with good conversion, it is not clear how to target an advertising campaign, and advertising “to everyone” means “to no one”.
What is a portrait of a potential buyer.
With modern competition in the field of online sales, it is not enough just to present an offer beautifully, it is necessary to show the user how the external, and, most importantly, the inner world of the buyer will change after the purchase and use of the product. That is, not a product is sold, but a result.
People buy any product based on 4 needs, which should be emphasized when compiling promotional materials:
1. Basic.
2. Social.
3. To improve the status.
4. Spiritual needs.
Accordingly, what should we know about our potential client?
Gender, age, income level, marital status, profession - i.e. socio-demographic data and psycho-graphic characteristics, where your target audience spends his free time (in which social networks he is registered, what forums he reads, etc.), i.e. her interests.
It is believed that approximately every seven years a person's life priorities, needs and pains change:
- 1-7 years, 7-14 years - not considered due to insolvency.
- 14-21 years old - friends, discos, finding and getting to know a partner, starting a family, looking for a job, ...
- 21-28 years old - family, children, career, still looking for a soul mate, unsuccessful marriage, better living conditions, ...
Etc.
Knowing the age, you can understand what worries and pains a person has at this stage of life, and how your product can help him solve them.
An important indicator is the level of income, the bar for making a decision to buy a product depends on it, so you are unlikely to sell, for example, the latest iPhone model to a student or a non-working housewife.
How and where to analyze the target audience.
There are many options for searching and researching the desired target audience, everyone who does this uses their own. I will describe what I do myself.
First, I do what is described above. Then I use it to supplement and summarize information. I would like to note that this generalized target audience is also heterogeneous, it has different segments both in terms of demography and other characteristics. Therefore, it is necessary to split it into different groups and draw up a portrait of a potential buyer for each.
And so, let's start.
The algorithm consists in searching, extracting and viewing the resources that your target audience visits and where hangs out, determining its demographic data, analyzing the key queries it enters to find solutions to problems that your offer can potentially solve and other important indicators.
And, of course, you need brainstorm, since it is impossible to find out complete information about buyers, and testing will show the accuracy of the compiled portrait of the target audience (avatar).
Write down all the data on the audience that you find during the research process, using the materials from this and the following articles, on a piece of paper, then, after comparison and analysis, summarize and write a description of the portrait of the ideal buyer for this product (if the offer is in trend and they are generally worth it) study).
The time spent on this will significantly save your advertising budget by increasing conversions.
Portrait of CA.
I give all the examples in the article on the offer N-stori.ru, which sells Nokia mobile devices, but I do not draw conclusions, but only demonstrate the algorithm of actions and the necessary services.
So, let's say I will sell a Nokia Lumia phone through an affiliate link.
Let's enter “Nokia Lumia” into the address bar of the browser and write down the addresses of a dozen sites from the search results on the sheet. These are sites from related topics and in the future we will try to find out the demographics of their visitors.
I took the domain of one of the sites from the issuance
and attributed to it "allnokia.ru demographics ", and again pasted into the address bar. extradition
Website quantcast.com unfortunately, does not provide information on sites with insufficient, in his opinion, attendance, about work in Alexa and similar web I wrote in the articles (link above).
This is demographic data on the target audience, below there is more interesting information on keywords and geography of requests
Information is entered into the sheet, other sites from the issuance are analyzed in the same way.
This is one of the ways to search and determine data, also use audience data, and record all new parameters on a sheet.
When there is enough data, you can make a description of your client (example: a man 20-25 years old, from Russia or Kazakhstan, no children, so he can spend money on himself, works as a lower-level manager, income 18-25 tr., is interested in music and games ......) and, on this basis, draw up an advertising campaign strategy.
If you seriously approach this rather routine work and, based on the analysis, segment your target audience as accurately as possible, identify the problems that the offer solves for it, come up with and build an advertising campaign for it from ads to landing - big profits are guaranteed.
Many people today operate with such a concept as the target audience, although they do not realize the full depth and complexity of this term. What is meant by it? Such a phrase in the advertising or marketing field of activity denotes a group of people who have some General characteristics, properties, interests, and therefore, with a high degree of probability, will pay attention to specific goods or services offered, respond to marketing offers or slogans exactly as their product creators expect.
The main property of the target audience is its needs and inclination to certain topics, thanks to which this target audience can be effectively (the result for an entrepreneur is successful sale) to offer any goods or services. Here are just some typical examples:
- Men aged 20-35 who play sports will be the target audience for sports nutrition creators;
- Women with a child under the age of 2-3 years are the target audience for manufacturers of goods for babies;
- Pensioners suffering from high blood pressure will buy blood pressure monitors more often than other members of society, etc.
The task of how to determine the target audience is a key one for every entrepreneur or manufacturer who wants to get the maximum benefit from their activities.
Interesting fact! Accurate identification of your potential client is the key to running almost any business.
What are the types of target audience
Each field of activity has its own rules for choosing a target audience. The types of the target audience depend on many factors, for example, on the solvency of potential customers, their wishes and all sorts of preferences, the desire to follow popular trends, etc. Each researcher of the issue has the right to carry out his own classification, but today Central Asia is divided by specialists into two main and large-scale camps:
- The main part or the main target audience. This includes those people who directly decide which brand of goods to buy and which services to order. Representatives of the main part themselves act as the initiator of the future investigation, they are the owners of the money;
- indirect part. The characteristics of this target audience may vary, but the common thing is that its representatives play a passive role in a future purchase or order. They can't initiate a deal, don't have money, or at all, or enough money to buy something.
This division is now the most used and widespread in the West and in Russia. The study of the target audience of both types is important for marketers, as it allows you to develop the most working solutions for implementing your assumptions.
How to identify the target audience and analyze it
A huge number of marketers are involved in determining the target audience, who strive to guess the wishes of potential customers as much as possible and make sure that their partners are sold out as intensively as possible. The values of each target audience can differ significantly, so it is important to define your target audience very clearly. For example, you can try to form the target audience of gadget lovers, but if you specify how many of them love smart watches or smartphones, it turns out that there are very few of them belonging to the former. Therefore, the seller of smart watches cannot count on such an audience.
To determine your group of buyers, for whom certain things will then be offered, you can use simple sources, for example,. Today, almost everyone uses it, so there is no problem in knowing the mood of the people and their disposition to buy this or that thing at a certain price. It is important not only to create a base of interests of your potential buyers, but also periodically refresh and optimize it with updated data. Periodic surveys are suitable for this, for example. Analytical services Wordstat, Google Trands will help you understand the overall picture of demand on the Internet for a product or service at a specific time in the desired region. With the help of these services, you can find out in which region which queries are most popular. For example, you can see how the demand of the target audience (the number of requests on the Internet) for the purchase of scooters in any city in Russia grows or falls over time. This tool is useful for doing analytics.
To determine your potential customers, you must first of all draw up a portrait of a typical client. This is necessary in order to clearly understand with whom you will have to interact and what rules you should follow.
Drawing up a portrait of a client should take into account the following critical points:
- The selection of the target audience begins with determining the age;
- The gender of a person plays a very important role, since women and men in most cases are aimed at completely different objects for purchase;
- Income level. The key point under which the manufacturer or seller of goods or services must adapt. If people do not have the kind of money you expect from them, then no matter how good your proposal is, it will not receive a response;
- Marital status, level of education and cultural development, field of activity are no less important points that you should always remember.
The description of the target audience should be as complete as possible, especially when it comes to really important things. This is the only way to expect maximum response from the consumer. The benefit of drawing up an adequate portrait of the average customer is that the entrepreneur will be able to take extremely reasonable steps and minimize the likelihood that there will be no buyers for his product (see).
Segmentation of the target audience using the 5W method
Target audience segmentation is the process of dividing potential buyers into separate groups that will set similar requirements for a product or service. The more competently segmentation is carried out, the more accurately it is possible to determine the group of people interested in the product. People are not original and they always have some general views on the product, requirements for it, wishes regarding delivery features, etc. Segments of the target audience, even regarding the same market position, can be so different that they do not agree with each other on the main issues. For example, take washing powder. One lady needs a washing powder, another for washing at any water temperature, a third will need a powder with a strong deodorant effect. They all end up in different groups interest.
There are many segmentation methods, but the most famous and popular among them is the 5W method. This is the 5 questions method, which is to answer the following:
- What- what kind of product or service do you offer, how do they differ from others;
- Who- here segmentation takes place according to the buyer: for whom your offer is intended, who can buy it;
- why- a motivational component that explains why people will want to buy this particular thing;
- When- This is a division in relation to when the consumer will need to buy the offered product;
- Where- Where a person can come across the idea that he should get his hands on the thing you offer.
This is the segmentation of the target audience according to the 5W rule. It is quite specific and allows you to quickly determine the portrait of your future consumer. Having a portrait of the target audience, compiled according to the 5W method, you can take on product development much more boldly.
Definition of the target audience: how to correctly describe the target audience
There are many characteristics that can be used to describe CA. Most often, the division occurs according to the following key parameters:
- Geolocation. It is very important to understand where your future client is located, where he lives, works, what he does in his free time, where he will use the thing that you are trying to sell him;
- demographic data. This includes age, gender, marital status, the presence or absence of children, other such things. They make up the keys of interest for a competent marketer, as they allow you to very accurately determine a person’s hobbies;
- Socio-economic characteristics. How much money your potential visitor has, how much of it he is willing to spend on what you offer him, what status and place he occupies in society, what he does in his business life. The portrait of the target audience, an example of which was given above, will be incomplete without such information;
- Psychographic segmentation. Quite a difficult task, which aims to take into account the mental characteristics of the consumer. But studying them is difficult, so the picture here will always be incomplete;
- behavioral factor. The most important point, which, with proper implementation, can replace all the others. For example, if you are going to sell fish tackle, then you don’t need to know the age, place of residence and the peculiarities of the psyche of each fisherman. It is enough to know that they love spinning rods and large bright floats.
Given these points, you can create a very clear portrait of the future consumer and guess his aspirations.
Interesting fact! If there are too many selection criteria, it gets in the way. It is important to highlight the most important among them.
Characteristics of the target audience and features of working with it
There is no need to stay on the decision to work with the target audience for a long time - it is necessary to move on to studying it and using the information received. Process in in general terms as follows:
- Creation of a unique selling proposition (USP). When you understand who you want to focus your proposal on, you need to concretize it and bring it to a completed form. Any target audience, examples of which are shown above, longs for something new, more accessible, interesting and profitable. You have to give it to her, taking into account all the features of the average client. The product may be typical, but its design options, some features and features of the advertising campaign must be customized to the information collected;
- Active use of the matching index, Affinity Index. This concept denotes how much more actively the target audience interacted with the object of its interest compared to other people. If the index is high, then the definition of the target audience happened correctly, if not, the analysis of the target audience was carried out with errors and needs to be corrected;
- The use of many channels for interaction with the target audience. Many advertising agencies in this regard, they are conservative and use 3-4 channels at the most. But the more there are, the better, so there is no point in saving here. You can use search engine optimization, contextual and targeted advertising, mailing to e-mail, bulletin boards and uniforms, as well as mass funds.
All these tools and a competent choice of the target audience together will definitely give the desired effect and allow you to bypass competitors in the development and popularity of your business.
What does the question of stereotypes mean for the target audience
The concept of the target audience, the methods of its definition, and other difficulties create the impression of talking about something too far away. But do not forget that the target audience is, first of all, ordinary people. And they are fully subject to a huge number of stereotypes - patterns of behavior and thinking accepted by the majority of society. Stereotypes can be of various kinds, but they leave a very strong imprint on every person and make him act with an eye on them. And in the same way, it will act when buying a product or service.
Consider an example. If you plan to sell razors and you will be with the help of a frail kid, the public will not understand. And even if he understands, he will still disdain to buy goods. If in advertising you use a brutal man who shaves for the 3rd time a day before an important event, then this will be a game on stereotypes and success here is unequivocal. That is why it is important to know not only how to correctly describe the target audience, but also how to skillfully play on the current strong stereotypes that most of the people around us are subject to.
The general characteristics of the target audience should always imply the effect of stereotypes on society, even if in a somewhat crude and generalized form.
Using the portrait and characteristics of the target audience: what tools to work with
If you already have the criteria for selecting the target audience, a portrait of the target audience has been drawn up, then it remains only to put the data into practice. You can do this with huge amount different programs. Here are just a small part of the services and applications for searching for the target audience present on the network:
- Service "Target Cerebro";
- similar web;
- Plarin;
- SocFishing;
- Free Hiconversion service;
- Allsocial and many others.
Now you have figured out what the target audience means and you can safely use the knowledge in your business. Only a competent and balanced approach will allow you to get the most out of your business and avoid potential troubles.