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How to Define and Segment Your Target Audience

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Table of contents of the article

Companies that know and understand their potential customers well tend to develop more successful products and launch more effective advertising. We figure out how to define your target audience (TA), understand its pains and needs, and describe it in a way that benefits the business.

What is a target audience?

A target audience is a group of people who have a need for a company's products and the ability to purchase them. In other words, these are the people the business should be focused on.

Members of such a group are grouped together by similar characteristics, such as gender, age, income, marital status, place of residence, etc. The target audience includes both potential and current clients of the company.
The target audience can often be divided into subgroups that have common needs. Here are examples of the target audience for the "coffee to go" product:

  • Office workers - men and women aged 25-40, usually lower and middle managers, buy coffee in the morning on the way to work to perk up.

  • Moms on maternity leave - women aged 23-35, as a rule, walk with their children and drink coffee "to go" to please themselves.

  • Students - men and women aged 18-23, may drink coffee instead of lunch and to recharge their batteries before classes.

Dividing the audience into such subgroups or identifying segments of the target audience is called segmentation. The largest and most profitable group is the core audience.
segmentation of target audience

The necessity of defining your target audience

A deep understanding of the target audience helps businesses at all stages of work - from developing a strategy and creating a product to selling it.
When developing a marketing strategy, knowing your audience will allow you to:


  • assess the development potential of your product - determine the market capacity and make an accurate sales forecast.
When creating a product, understanding the needs and pain points of customers will help:

  • determine what the design and functionality of the product should be, its characteristics and cost;

  • understand what people are willing to pay more for;

  • identify related products or services that can be additionally offered to customers.
target audience advertising
When launching advertising campaigns, information about the target audience will allow you to:

  • select appropriate promotion channels and target advertising to the right people;

  • tell about the product in the client's language, choose the right tone of communications;

  • come up with such creatives and advertising techniques that will be heard by the client - affect a person's emotions and hit him straight in the heart;

When organizing sales, understanding the target audience will also allow you to:

  • select appropriate distribution channels;

  • place products on shelves correctly;

  • create commercial offers and sales scripts that take into account the customer's motives and pain points, as well as the factors that influence their decision to purchase.
Attentive attitude and understanding of the target audience helps to build long-term and trusting relationships with people, increase their loyalty. For business as a whole, this means maintaining the client base, saving money on promotion and, in the long term, increasing the company's profitability.
target audience strategy

Characteristics that describe the target audience

There are many parameters that describe the target audience. Which ones to use depends on the specific business task.

The basic set of characteristics is gender, age, income and geography of residence of potential clients. But most often these parameters are not enough to deeply understand the needs and pain points of the audience. Let's consider a more detailed list of characteristics.
Socio-demographic parameters:

  • gender;
  • age and, as a result, belonging to demographic groups - "boomers", "zoomers", etc.;
  • education level;
  • income, position and field of activity, social status;
  • marital status and presence of children;
  • place of residence, including the size of the settlement and climate zone;
  • nationality and mentality features.
Behavioral characteristics in relation to a product or brand:

  • how often a person makes a purchase of certain goods and at what cost;
  • where he buys, what channels he uses;
  • where he gets information about products, what advertising he sees;
  • what motivates him to buy, how he makes a decision;
  • how he relates to a specific category of goods and to different brands.
Psychographic parameters, that is, personal characteristics of a person:

  • lifestyle, interests and values;
  • hobbies and interests, including how they relax and have fun;
  • dreams and life aspirations - what they love, what they want to be;
  • pains, fears, experiences - what worries them most, what they want to avoid;
  • brands they trust and use;
  • celebrities they watch and want to be like, etc.
You can come up with other characteristics that describe the characteristics of the target audience. But the priority parameters are those that help first of all to answer the question "what needs does a person have".
The target audience should be described first by the most priority parameters, gradually expanding their range.
Parameters of the target audience

Types of target audience

Marketers distinguish several types of target audience in order to qualitatively work out each of the possible directions.
1
Primary and indirect audience
The primary audience is those people who purchase the product. Indirect audience is those who influence the purchase decision.

For example, a mother buys a toy for her child that he likes. The primary audience is mothers, indirect audience is children. The child influences the purchase decision, chooses the type of toy. But the mother pays for the product and if she finds it unsuitable or unsafe, the purchase will not take place.
2
B2B and B2C clients
B2B or business to business, is a type of cooperation in which a company sells a product to another company. B2C, or business to customer, is the sale of goods and services from a company to a person.

For example, a manufacturer of equipment can sell it to wholesale warehouses of other stores, or can sell it to end customers, for example, through a website or marketplaces. For wholesale stores and for end users, the criteria for choosing a supplier will be very different.
3
Broad and narrow target audience
A broad target audience is all potential customers who may be interested in the product. A narrow target audience is small segments of the audience that have special needs.

An example of a large audience is milk buyers. According to VTsIOM, more than 70% of the country's population drinks milk. You can segment the audience and identify several narrow subgroups:

  • Some people who have health issues buy only lactose-free milk.
  • Some are losing weight, and therefore it will be important for this audience to know the fat content and calorie content of milk.
  • Another part cares about health and prefers only local milk with a short shelf life, as they believe that such products are more beneficial, etc.
When identifying a narrow audience, it is important to assess its capacity - potential profitability for the company. The potential income from working with these people should exceed the costs of developing and promoting the corresponding product.
4
Cold, warm and hot audience
The audience is also divided by the degree of readiness to buy. Cold audience is the least ready for it, and hot audience has already chosen the product, made a decision to buy and is ready to pay for it.

People with different levels of readiness to buy have different motivators. Cold audience needs to be helped to form a need, warm audience needs to be told about ways to solve the problem and the advantages of a product of a particular brand, and hot audience can already be stimulated with promotions and discounts.
define the target audience

How to define the target audience?

There are several different ways to define the target audience of a product.

If the product already exists and the market for similar products is formed, you can use the following methods:

  • Analyze the company's current customers. Determine who and why most often buys its products, as well as what groups these people can be divided into.
  • Study competitors. Their audience may differ significantly from yours. Analyze what additional market segments they cover and at what expense.
  • Research market demand and general trends. See what products people are interested in on the Internet, how they solve their problems.
If you are developing an innovative or fundamentally new product, the sales market for which has not yet been formed, and therefore the level of demand is not clear, you can use the so-called CustDev research. They allow you to describe the preferences of the target audience and its needs, and formulate requirements for the future product.

As a rule, CustDev research begins with focus groups or in-depth interviews with potential clients - at this stage, a set of hypotheses is formed about the audience and the future product. The next step is usually quantitative research - online or offline surveys. They are needed to confirm or refute the obtained hypotheses, more accurately assess the capacity of the segment and the relevance of the problem that the new product will solve.

Where can I get information about the target audience?

You can find information about your target audience in several sources, for example:

  • Your own sales statistics. It's great if, in addition to the names and contacts of clients, the company also collects their socio-demographic data.
  • Statistics of visits to the brand's social networks. Social networks have a section with page statistics for this.
  • Ready-made market research. You can, among other things, find free research from open sources.
  • Custom research. This can be interviews, surveys, focus groups with clients of the company or competitors.
  • Real communication with clients. You can study correspondence on forums and recordings of telephone conversations with the support service to better understand the needs of the audience, their pains and problems.
  • Google Trends services. They will help you find out what potential clients are most often interested in, what problems they want to solve.

Before searching for information and conducting research, it is best to personally communicate with a representative of the target audience, for example, talk to the company's clients and observe them at points of sale. This will help you form the right idea about them and, perhaps, give you new ideas.
information about the target audience

Questions for studying and finding an audience

There are many parameters that describe the audience. The following methods will help systematize the questions for studying the needs of the audience.
The 5W Method
To study and segment the target audience, you need to answer five main questions:
1
What. What is the client interested in? What product or service does he need?
2
Who. Who is this person? What is his gender, age, income, place of residence?
3
Why. Why and for what purpose does he buy the product? What problem does he want to solve?
4
When. When and under what circumstances does the purchase take place?
5
Where. Where does he make the purchase? What channels and resources does he use for this?
This definition of the target audience helps to quickly and clearly describe the key segments of the target audience.
The 5W Method
Defining the target audience "from the product"
To describe the target audience of a finished product, you need to study its current consumers and ask them questions that will help you understand the characteristics of the target audience - socio-demographic, behavioral and psychographic.
These could be, for example, the following questions:

  • Where do the buyers of this product live?
  • How old are they?
  • What do they do?
  • What problems and needs do they have? What worries them?
  • What kind of lifestyle do they strive for? What do they want to be?
  • When do they buy the product? What motivates them to buy?
Search for an audience "from the opposite"
With this method, you need to first describe not the audience of the product, but the useful action that it performs. At the same time, each useful action can be relevant for different audiences - you need to brainstorm and make a list of them.

For example, a product such as "coffee to go" can perform the following useful action:
  • Invigorate, tone and energize.
  • Give pleasure from a special taste.
  • Give a feeling that you are a modern and stylish resident of a metropolis with a glass of coffee in your hands.
  • Save time on a snack and even replace breakfast or lunch.
Each of these actions is relevant for different audiences. For example, saving time can be useful for an office worker, a student or a mother on maternity leave, etc.

Search "from the opposite" can give new ideas on where to find the target audience of the brand. This method can be used in combination with other approaches.

Segmenting the target audience

After collecting information from different sources, you need to analyze it and segment potential clients, that is, divide the audience into groups with similar needs.

At the analysis stage, you can select any number of segments, but it is better to take three to five target audiences into work. You need to choose a priority target audience based on the segment capacity - the potential profit it can bring to the business.
Segmenting the target audience

How to describe your audience?

In order to describe your audience more accurately and better understand its needs, you need to create a customer profile for each segment. Sometimes it is also called an "avatar" or "persona".

Target audience profile


A potential client profile is a detailed description of a typical representative of the target audience with specific details. To create a profile, you need to indicate the first and last name of the hypothetical target audience representative, their age, education, place of work, pains and needs, fears and life aspirations, etc.

Creating a target audience profile allows you to better understand customer triggers, select effective motivators and formulate a marketing message more accurately. For example, you can offer Jack gym services, vitamins or takeaway coffee so that he feels more confident and energetic and can quickly achieve his life goals.
A potential client profile is a detailed description of a typical representative of the target audience with specific details. To create a profile, you need to indicate the first and last name of the hypothetical target audience representative, their age, education, place of work, pains and needs, fears and life aspirations, etc.

Creating a target audience profile allows you to better understand customer triggers, select effective motivators and formulate a marketing message more accurately. For example, you can offer Jack gym services, vitamins or takeaway coffee so that he feels more confident and energetic and can quickly achieve his life goals.
Universal customer portrait template

Basic mistakes when describing the target audience


Here are some common mistakes that are made when searching for and describing the target audience:

  • Insufficiently detailed description of the audience. For example, when only gender, age and geography of residence are indicated. This is not enough to create a successful product or develop a striking advertisement.

  • Excessive generalization. The audience can be described in detail, but several segments with different needs are generalized into one large cluster. One segment should have one leading need that the product solves.

  • Incorrect choice of target audience. For example, choosing too narrow a segment that will not bring the company sufficient profit.

  • Choosing too many target segments. In this case, the focus of the work is scattered, and budgets for each segment are usually reduced.
target audience
Conclusion

In order to define your target audience, you need to analyze the company's current clients, competitors' audiences, and general market trends. The second step is to identify the socio-demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics of the target audience and then segment potential clients, that is, group them into groups with common needs.

In order to clearly describe each segment, you need to create a detailed portrait of the target audience representative - with specific details from the person's life. Audience portraits allow you to better understand the needs of potential clients, their main triggers and motivators.
Studying the target audience is an integral part of business, because the development of any product or launch of an advertising campaign begins with the question "who are we doing this for?" Understanding your audience allows a company to build strong and trusting relationships with customers, and in the long term, to become more profitable and competitive.
Relationship manager in content marketing department
Author - Relationship manager in content marketing department
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