Target audience: how to find yours and use it in your strategies?
You've probably seen some articles here on the blog about creating planning and organizing content. So, you may have noticed that in all these articles, there is one element in common: the target audience.
That's right. Defining who your strategy will talk to is one of the fundamental points to start developing it. Therefore, it is essential that you, as a marketer, know everything about target audience research and the best techniques and tools to effectively define and segment your campaigns.
With this in mind, our team revealed all the steps we use here at Beatz to help you in this phase of your planning. If you still don't know where to start, in this article, you'll begin to take the first steps towards your successful strategy.
So, enjoy the content and answer all your questions about defining a target audience for your next campaigns. Good reading!
What is a target audience?
The target audience is a group of people, segmented through common characteristics, to whom your brand's message will be conveyed.
Therefore, to define it, it is necessary to gather a series of data, such as: information geographic, demographic, behavioral and psychographic. Among this information, the most common are:
- Age;
- Gender;
- Income;
- Educational level;
- Interests;
- Goals;
- Among others.
This way, you can make your content, campaigns and actions more targeted and communicate the message in question more effectively. As the saying goes: “whoever wants to please everyone ends up pleasing no one”.
Why define a target audience?
In fact, this is a fundamental stage in the planning created for your strategy. After all, as we saw previously, you cannot direct a communication campaign without knowing who you should communicate with, right?
This way, we already have the answer to the main question when starting a conversation about target audience: What is the purpose of this limitation?
Understand that not everyone in the world needs your product, many don't know they need it. However, a considerable portion needs your product, but may not know your brand yet. Of these three examples, which one would make the most sense for your communication strategy?
It's obvious that the focus would be on people who need it, but haven't yet chosen a brand and need to know more about your company. After all, this may be a target audience delimitation.
In other words, segmentation may depend on your intention, but, regardless of what it is, it is impossible to achieve your objectives by talking to everyone.
How do I know who my audience is?
The process for defining the audience for your strategy, or even your product, lies in deepening your research. You need to know all the details that can positively or negatively affect the reception of the main message.
Therefore, the first tip for you who are thinking about determining the target audience for your campaign is: understand the market in which your company operates. So, you can search for information such as:
- Positioning of competitors;
- Characteristics of the segments served by them;
- How they act;
- Unsupported needs and demands;
- Behavioral characteristics;
- Consumption habits;
- Among others.
With this information, you need to look back at your brand and product. In other words, ask yourself what your brand's value proposition is, what its highlights are among the competition, and the characteristics of your product that will be attractive to your target audience.
In this way, by segmenting the audience, based on the categories mentioned above (geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral), it is possible to understand what the ideal customer profile is for your brand.
With all this defined, it’s time to determine how to reach this audience. In other words, this is where we identify the best language for this process, the main channels and other essential resources for this contact.
How to define the audience for your strategy?
In fact, knowing the market, your product and, ultimately, your audience is the objective we are trying to achieve. But how to find so much data?
Here at Beatz, for example, we invest in tools that have already become essential for the process of defining the persona and target audience. To help you with this task, we have separated the main ones. Check it out below!
- Google Analytics;
- Google Trends;
- Online forms such as Google Forms;
- Research institutes (the IBGE is one of the most used);
- Audience Insights;
- Among other platforms.
Target audience x Persona
In the previous topic, you may have noticed that I mentioned something like “persona”. It is necessary to pay attention, as it is a very common mistake to confuse this term with the target audience.
This is because both, in a certain way, are related and even have a certain level of dependence. After building your main segmentation, made up of a group of people with similar characteristics, you can go further.
To do this, you need to define a persona, that is, an ideal customer that is stipulated through the information collected. This way, you can make your content even more exclusive.
It is important to keep in mind that the persona is a semi-fictitious customer. Therefore, information collected in the process of defining the target audience is taken into account, but it does not fail to observe experiences with potential clients and professionals in the area.
Furthermore, unlike the public, your persona receives a fixed name and age, as well as tastes, desires, pains, and other information that bring them closer to reality.
Did you like today's content? So I'm sure you'll want to check out the our blog. There you will find several articles that will help you better understand the world of digital marketing and plan the best strategies. Access right now!