How to research the target audience for your business

Understand your Target Audience and Demographic

An essential part of your digital marketing plan is to identify who your marketing efforts will be geared towards. Before you launch any sort of marketing campaign or website, it is crucial to establish who you are communicating with. This will affect every decision for your campaign from the writing style and content, the use of images, the places you advertise and promote, even your branding style. Understanding your target demographic is extremely important, so let's define who our audience actually are.

Profiling your target audience

• Demographics

  Identify key information such as the age range, gender, income, location of your target audience. Start to build a profile of your ideal user including stats and status. Think about their hobbies and activities to help with promotional decisions later on.

• Buying Habits

  Include details on possible buying habits, where they browse for information and products and what devices  and platforms they use. Do they use social media, is word of mouth and referral important to them? What time of month or year will they be looking to purchase and for what reasons?

• Challenges and Goals

  Is there a focus on quality, cost, service, or speed? What problem are they looking to solve when seeking out your services? What need are they looking to fill with your products and offerings? Identifying these points will help you when deciding on your promotional and content marketing to gain more traffic to your website by addressing the wider needs at an earlier stage in the buying decision process.

You can profile your audience in a number of ways, including;

• Interviewing your users (either in person or on the phone)
• Surveys & focus groups
• Researching other businesses in the same industry

It's important to make use of your existing customers and those of your competitors to gain a clear idea of your demographic and their behaviour. From this information, create a profile of your ideal customer, and we can then use this throughout our planning.