What do you mean by Target Audience?

Advertising has long been considered a commercial engine, but every engine needs a direction. And this is the definition of the target audience that will help you choose the right direction in online store advertising and further development. Owners of various levels of online trading platforms need to define a target audience in order to maximize advertising effectiveness and narrow the path to a potential consumer.

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What do you mean by Target Audience?

The target audience (or target group) is the group of people who are most interested in delivering and ordering a particular product or service.

The main value of the target audience in marketing is that the representatives of the selected group want to buy a specific product. Therefore, the marketer creates an ad that takes into account the taste preferences or characteristics of this particular group, which significantly increases the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

And if you think your store’s target audience is “high-income women and men under the age of 25-35”, move on to the next point. Such simple information does not give a positive result!

Why do you need to know your target audience?

Why is it so important to know your target audience? There are several reasons for this:

Create the most successful advertising campaign (SMM, banner, contextual, mailing); Establish the right assortment for a specific target audience;
Conducting communication with customers, promotions, sales, and other campaigns aimed at attracting new customers;
Lack of time for store development and promotion;
Selection of new products, creation of specific products that will interest a specific target audience.

How to identify the target audience of any business?

To identify the target audience of any business, you should follow the list below:

Basic characteristics (gender, age, geography);
Interests that can be found by searching social networks and target communities;
Solvency of potential customers. If you sell VIP tours to foreign countries, in most cases your target audience may not include students, maternity leave moms, state employees, etc.; Work.

Everything here is very simple, just ask a question, what problems does your product help solve? The answer to this is to help clarify the situation.

The larger the list, the narrower the target audience, but there are specific methods and support criteria for determining the target audience, which we will consider.

B2B and B2C when building target audiences

Can the target audience of an online store be b2b and b2c at the same time? In fact, a cosmetic store can sell items to private customers and beauty salons.

If your end-users are only b2b type, it will be easier for you. The fact is that the B2B segment is more stable, except during times of crisis. But the B2C type does not boast stability, because the commodity market is constantly filled with modern technologies, new developments, better formulations of cosmetics, which prevent sharp fluctuations in demand.

Therefore, marketers developing a campaign for the B2C sector will need to monitor the market almost every month, noting the slightest change. This is necessary for a timely manner to correct the data on the target audience. When choosing a buyer for the B2C type, the main mistake is worth remembering - it has a wide target audience. To avoid errors, partitioning is required.

How to segment your target audience?

Larger audience studies show that it is easier to establish communication with smaller groups of buyers who are united in the target audience. There are 4 basic principles of division:

When the consumer market is segmented by countries, regions, and roads based on geography and project level.
Demographics (age, gender, religion, family). Purchasing activities of different groups are based on these characteristics.
Socio-economic characteristics. These include education, income level, and housing status. This criterion refers to the buyer’s preferences and his ability to pay.
Psychological standard is obtained by studying social status, life principles, and lifestyle.

The following analysis tools are used to capture information and further divide the target audience:

Google Analytics is a highly trending tool to measure analytics of any business
A survey in a group on a website or social network. Allows you to receive information about targeted infections, age, preferences, and other important data about users;
Internal and external (on third-party sites) surveys of potential visitors; Surveys and other research conducted by marketing agencies.

The 5W method by Mark Sherington

To determine the target audience, it is necessary to divide the market using 5 key queries (Scherington’s 5W):

What? - Type of goods.
Who? - User type.
Why? Purchase motivation.
When? - When buyers want to buy.
Where? - Place to sell.

As you can see, the results obtained are the final touch in the market segmentation process, helping to identify the target audience. Using this technology, you can create effective advertising and presentations for your product taking into account the requests, needs, and lifestyle of the target audience.

Target Audience: An Example

When choosing a target audience for an online store, owners often make a mistake: they choose a wide target audience. It covers all potential customers but does not co-operate to pay for advertising and business promotion.

This indicates that the product being sold to a wider target audience is of interest not only to a specific audience representative but also to any other group that has the authority to choose the product. For example, children choose toys, but parents buy accessories, a woman chooses cosmetics for herself, but a man can buy for gifts.

Typically, a marketer divides a broad target audience into multiple segments to meet the needs of different target groups of customers. After all, a broader target audience is not a carrier of the same needs and interests.

Here is a more detailed example for a wider target audience, which we will divide into sections:

Tickets for Doroga company’s buses, the service is designed for buyers of different ages.
Target audience: Women and men aged 18 to 80 years.
CA covers all segments of the population.
Marital Status: Married/Unmarried.
Interests: Travel, work, leisure, and others.
Women and men between the ages of 18 and 60 are the main segments of the target audience.

Conventionally, the broader target audience has been divided into 3 groups:

Young people aged 18-27 and students moving to another area for study rarely travel for tourism purposes.
Business Men. Age - 30-55 years, go on business trips, on vacation to remote areas of the location, to meet partners.
55-70-year-olds buy cheaper tickets for tours or visit children in another city.

All groups require special advertisements, promotions, and other offers. But representatives of these groups interested in various commercials still end up on the same bus.

Target audience portrait

Target audience portrait is an accurate description of a bright representative of a specific target audience. That is, it is an imaginary person for which marketers come forward with name, age, passion, and so on. Sometimes they even choose a photo. Naturally, all the traits of this guy were taken from the audience he belonged to.

To create a target audience portrait, the following scheme is used:

1. Social characteristics include gender, age, marital status, income, occupation.
2. Entertainment data (forums, thematic sites, online stores, social resources).
3. What problems does your product help solve for a potential buyer?
4. How does a potential buyer feel about your product? Does it offer beauty, shape body, relaxation, or anything?
5. Why should the customer buy your product and not follow the competitors’ links?

Drawing a picture of the target audience can help you find a common language with the target audience. The purpose of the drawing is to provide a face and character to the resulting data. After all, working with anonymous data is not as effective.

Final Thought

At any stage of online store development, it is a good idea to keep the target audience search as a top priority list. A vague or inaccurate image of the target audience can lead to you not being able to find buyers for your product.