In our tip Why it is important to really know your target market, we explored the value of understanding the important characteristics of your target market in order to provide the best solutions for them and retain them over the years. There are many ways to find information about your target audience, and you just might already be familiar with the tools, but not using them to your advantage.
There are four major areas of segmentation that you can work with to mine enough information to define your business’s target audience:
- Geographic
- Demographic
- Psychographic
- Behavioral
Each of these areas provides a unique insight into your target market, helping you to identify their preferences. Here are six tools you can use to learn more about who your current visitors and customers are, as well as the audience you want to attract:
Focus on social media analytics
If you operate business accounts and have already built a social media following on various platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, then you already have tools you can use to find out more about who your audience is.
Social media analytics provide insights on consumer demographics and behavior, helping you to understand your target audience more. This way, you can easily tell what kind of viewers your content and marketing strategy is attracting, which in turn will help you tweak your messaging to appeal to your Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP).
Look through your website analytics
The most common tool for website analytics is Google Analytics. There are many aspects of Google Analytics that help you dive deep into website users’ behavior, making it easy for you to get as much insight as possible on your target audience. Google Analytics will give you information like:
- Geographic location and language
- Demographics (age and gender)
- Interests, e.g. baking, cooking, sports, technology, gardening, etc.
- How they are currently interacting with the information on your website
Having this information will help you figure out not only how to develop the right solutions but also strategies on how to retain your customers and come up with additional or better services/products to serve them.
Work with an eCommerce platform
If you sell products, use the data you gather from sales. Most eCommerce platforms store information about your customers as they interact with your business. You may not have your own platform allowing you to own all your customer data, but that shouldn’t stop you from leveraging your customer data stored in whichever platform you’re using.
Some of the customer details from an eCommerce that you can use are:
- Abandoned shopping carts
- Product wish lists
- Loyalty program data
- Net promoter score (NPS)
All these functions help you to identify customer behavior, preferences, and satisfaction. If you combine that information with cookie data and/or any third-party insights available to you, you can figure out how best to leverage your product for maximum returns.
Conducting surveys
Conducting surveys with your best customers offers you a glimpse of what may otherwise remain unsaid about your target audience. Customized surveys that collect information specific to your brand can provide unique insights into your target market. If you conduct surveys regularly or encourage your customers to update their information, you can also use the new data to get ahead of any market trends and beat your competition.
Work through social listening
A little different from social media tracking, social listening is a valuable tool to help you know why your audience says certain things about your brand or related businesses on social media. Social listening tools can enable you to monitor multiple social platforms and check brand mentions, keyword searches, tags, and direct mentions.
This can reveal valuable information like the brands they interact with most and why, the trending topics that they follow, and where they spend their resources most, be it time or money.
This kind of information is very important when you’re selecting your marketing strategies and/or when packaging your products or services.
Analyze your competition
Once you have identified industry competitors that have the same target audience as you, try and understand their strategies from reviews people have given them. A few guiding questions:
- What techniques and methods do they use?
- How do they package their messaging and services or products?
- Which channels do they use to reach their target audience?
- Are their strategies working?
This is an easy way of gathering information about your target audience. Here, you can pick up useful tips on what your audience really likes and also learn from your competition’s mistakes on what to do better.
In conclusion
The journey of discovering your target market should be an ongoing process. Customer needs and preferences keep changing, and you need to keep up with them through the marketing and buying cycles.
Apart from social media, you can also conduct market research through case studies and looking through psychological analyses by marketers in your industry.
We’ve created a worksheet to help you identify who your target market is. It all begins with a look at the 4 main segments we use to identify the market. Grab a copy for yourself and get clear on who you’re selling to. And, if you get stuck, we’re here to help.
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