Target audience analysis

7 min read

Target audience analysis is an integral part of any successful marketing strategy. After all, unless you know who your target audience is, what they like, and how you can reach them, you cannot create relevant content for that audience.

Before you launch a new marketing campaign, you need to understand exactly who you want to address. These people are known as the ‘target audience’. This target audience is essentially a group of people who share similar needs and characteristics. As a result, a target group is usually described on the basis of demographic and socio-economic characteristics, for example married men over the age of 40 who earn more than £40,000 and are living in London.

Put simply, your target audience is the group (or different groups) of people who are most likely to purchase your product or service. By narrowing the focus of your marketing efforts and only targeting those who will be most receptive to your marketing messages, you’ll be able to market your business more efficiently and effectively. 

What is a target audience analysis?

Now we’ve outlined exactly what we mean by the term ‘target audience’, we need to look into exactly what a ‘target audience analysis’ is.

In the world of marketing and consumer insights, target audience analysis refers to researching the demographics, interests, and preferences of a group of customers. Audience insights we recommend monitoring include:

• Demographics: Age, gender, religious beliefs, and physical location.
• Interests: The different types of content they consume and the verticals they’ve expressed interest in through their behaviour, such as by following Facebook pages
• Psychographics: This covers psychological attributes such as values, opinions, attitudes, and lifestyles
• Activity: This is based on specific actions that people take following marketing messages, such as signing up to your mailing list or taking advantage of an offer or a trial

As a result, a target audience analysis is a structured process where you gather and interpret information and data about the people who are most likely to purchase your product or service. This way, you can ensure that your marketing campaigns are seen by the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

The aim of employing a target audience marketing strategy is to identify the unique and common characteristics that your best customers share. Once you have this information, you can then analyse it in greater detail in order to create actionable consumer insights and buyer personas.

Uses for target audience analysis

Depending on the goals and needs of your business, a target audience marketing strategy can take many forms and suit several different purposes. However, its main purposes are:

Locating an audience

One of the simplest insights you can gain about your audience is their location. This applies both in a physical sense (what city they’re in) and where they are online (what websites they’re visiting and the channels they use).

Due to this, you can use a target audience analysis to identify where people are discussing your brand, product, or any other topic. Alternatively, you can filter any of your other analysis results by location to better understand the characteristics of your audience in a specific area.

Understanding the key demographics of your audience

How much does your business really know about its audience? Sadly, too many businesses work on assumptions that prove to be incorrect. With the help of a target audience analysis, you can understand whether your audience is primarily male or female, its age profile, and its socio-economic status.

Shared interests and characteristics

Although it’s highly useful to understand the demographics of your audience, this should merely form the start of the target audience analysis process. This is because as well as knowing who your audience is, you also need to understand what they like and care about.

Once you know this information, you can create content that appeals to them on a human level and targets their interests.

Finding new audiences

Once you’re certain that you fully understand your existing audience, you can look at ways to expand your reach and bring new customers to the business.

Segmenting your audience

In the modern world, customers expect tailored and personalised communications from brands they like and trust. By running a target audience analysis and then breaking down your audience into the right segments, you can target the correct customers and measure your campaigns more effectively.

Target audience analysis examples

Now we’ve discussed what a target audience analysis is and its potential uses, let’s take a look at a couple of target audience analysis examples that show you the process in action. We’ll start with a theoretical example, and then look at two successful campaigns that were run by guitar manufacturer Fender.

A successful audience analysis will provide a business with a much deeper understanding of the factors that compel a customer to either support their business or make a purchase with them. As a result, while it’s important to understand the basic demographics of an audience, a more powerful analysis that also assesses the intricacies of consumer preferences is much more helpful.

For example, if a coffee chain wants to attract and retain more of its customers, then it needs to know much more than the demographic details of coffee drinkers in its locations. In this scenario, it’s much more important for the business to understand the coffee preferences of its customers and how these preferences have changed over time.

By conducting a much deeper form of customer analysis that goes beyond demographic data, the coffee shop in question can learn more about the trends that are shaping the marketplace. By knowing this information, they can move with the times and ensure they’re meeting the needs of their most important customers. If not, other businesses in such a crowded marketplace could steal them.  

For example, an audience analysis could reveal that customers within the coffee shop’s target audience are increasingly purchasing cold brew coffee. In this instance, the coffee shop can update their menu and advertising strategies to promote this product above less popular items. These target customers could also be sent incentives that are directly linked to cold brew coffees.

Fender: A case study

Now we’ve outlined a successful target audience analysis example, let’s take a look at two real-world campaigns that were highly successful for music instrument designer Fender.

Back in 2016, Fender launched a new bass guitar that had been designed by Red Hot Chilli Peppers bassist Flea. Prior to launching their marketing campaign, they determined the right audience using a target audience analysis. In doing so, they found that the intended audience loved Flea’s individuality and his unique personality.

As a result, they launched a campaign that asked fans to share a photo of their own unique musical style for a chance to win the new bass, with Flea himself picking the winner. The campaign then went on to be a massive success, partially because it was guided by the audience.

Following their Flea campaign, the company realised that their audience was mostly older males. Due to this, they began to research the opportunity to reach female guitar players.

Although they’d assumed that women would primarily be interested in acoustic guitars, their target audience analysis revealed that women actually preferred electric guitars. Using this information, they were able to target this segment of customers much more effectively, rather than following a hunch that later proved to be incorrect.

Why target audience analysis is important

A target audience marketing strategy provides your business with a number of benefits. Firstly, conducting a target audience analysis provides you with the insight required to successfully streamline your marketing processes and ensure that you’re always deriving maximum value from each campaign.

By customising your content so that it suits a group of customers who have statistically been shown as the ones that are most likely to convert, you can save time, money, and internal resources by choosing to omit certain demographics who aren’t deemed to be as valuable.

On top of this, when you know exactly who your best customers are and what they’re looking for, you can strategically develop new products and services to solve common problems amongst these groups.

Overall, a target audience marketing strategy can help you:

• Find and target the audience that may be interested in your products or services
• Craft personalised content that’s aimed specifically at your target personas
• Develop long-term relationships with your customers
• Boost the cost-effectiveness of your marketing strategy
• Improve your conversion rate
• Lower targeting costs
• Improve loyalty and retention

Target audience analysis tools

When performed on a manual basis, a target audience analysis can be incredibly time consuming. Plus, it can be very challenging for you to have a full view of all the required customer data. Thankfully, there are tools available to help you.

Our target audience analysis tools can help you conduct your analysis in a number of different ways. Firstly, our tools allow you to segment your customers based on socio-demographic, psychographic, and behaviour-based characteristics. On top of this, you can also employ geoanalysis for a fresh perspective on areas in terms of market penetration and purchasing potential. Alternatively, you can perform a cluster analysis and look for patterns in your data to identify groups.

On top of this, our marketing targeting and analysis tools can be used to mine a wide range of customer data to pinpoint the ideal audience for the right marketing campaign. They can help you understand your customer profiles, identify your top customers, or perform a sentiment analysis.  

Additionally, our tools allow you to visualise your data in many ways and build audience segments for your campaigns on any device and quickly export the data. Using this simplified approach to building audience definitions helps you create, refine, and share campaign audiences with colleagues in an easy-to-use and safe environment.

If you’d like to learn more about how our target audience analysis tools can help with your target audience marketing strategy, then enjoy a free trial of Apteco Orbit™ today. Alternatively, get in touch with us about a one-to-one demo.