If you want to sell your product or service effectively, it’s essential to know your target audience as well as possible. A target audience analysis is therefore a crucial step. A target audience analysis is essentially a study that results in a description of the group of people most likely to be interested in your products and/or services. To help you with this, we’ve outlined a step-by-step plan for your target audience analysis below. Following these 10 steps will provide you with a framework for conducting a target audience analysis for your business.
1. Formulate the objective(s)
The main idea behind conducting a target audience analysis should hopefully become clear as you follow these 10 steps. However, it is advisable to clearly articulate exactly what you hope to achieve with this target audience analysis. As part of getting to know your target audience better, you might, for example, state that you want to better position your company, that you want to assess current customer satisfaction, and that you want to gather more information to develop a comprehensive strategic marketing plan.
2. What information do you need?
After formulating your goals, it’s time to note down exactly what information you need to achieve them. Keep in mind that this might involve many more different types of data than you might initially expect. For example, when conducting a target audience analysis, the following data often needs to be gathered:
- Demographic data: data relating to age, gender, ethnicity, education, and family status.
- Geographic data: this is data about where your (potential) customers are located.
- Socioeconomic data related to educational levels, occupations, and incomes.
- Psychographic data: this refers to people’s lifestyles and preferences.
- Data related to your website and your brand. This can be important for determining customer satisfaction, brand awareness, market share, and purchase intent.
3. Formulate main and sub-questions
Based on the previous step, you will then formulate main and sub-questions. Naturally, the answers to these must align with the data you intend to collect according to the previous step. Logical questions might include:
- What is the age range of my target audience?
- Is my target audience primarily men or women?
- What specific preferences does my target audience have?
- Where do people in my target audience live?
- What is my target audience’s online behavior? You can find this out by using a good keyword planner.
- What is the general educational level of my (potential) clients?
4. Determine which sources to consult
Finding answers to your questions isn’t always easy. Fortunately, there are numerous sources and tools that can help you with this. Of course, you can gather a lot of information via Google and the aforementioned keyword planner, but this might not be enough. In that case, keep in mind that sources such as the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the Chamber of Commerce (KVK), literature, and (trade) journals can also provide you with plenty of answers. You can also consult your own customer database or conduct a survey among your customers.
5. Search and find answers to your questions
As you can see, there are various ways and different sources you can turn to for answers. The key is to go through these sources step by step or put them to use. Hopefully, this will help you gather the information you’re looking for.
6. Elaborate on the answers
After gathering answers, it’s time to organize the information you’ve gathered. You do this by formulating clear, well-reasoned answers to the questions you formulated in step 3.
7. Create a persona
Once you’ve completed the previous steps, you should be ready to start creating a persona. A persona refers to a fictional person with the characteristics you believe are most common within your target audience. A persona should therefore fit all aspects of your target audience. The more detailed your description of the persona, the better.
8. If necessary: repeat all previous steps
For many companies and many products, there is no single, specific target audience. That is why it can be useful to repeat the steps described above. This may lead you to identify two, three, or even four personas that fall within your target audiences.
9. Implement in your marketing strategy
Once you’ve developed one or more personas based on your detailed target audience analysis, it’s obviously time to put them to use. First, a comprehensive target audience analysis is part of your overall marketing strategy. This marketing strategy is crucial for the long-term survival of your business. This is especially true if your organization plans to form partnerships, make a business investment, or seek external investors or sponsors.
Furthermore, it is, of course, essential to put your target audience analysis into practice at some point. Both your offline advertising, your website, and your SEO activities should be adapted accordingly. For the online component, for example, it is essential that keywords frequently used by your target audience appear on your website and in links to it.
10. Perform measurements
After you’ve put your marketing strategy in general and your target audience analysis into practice, it’s ultimately advisable to conduct regular measurements. Fortunately, especially in online marketing, there is a great deal that can be measured. For this, you can use an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. This allows you to measure, among other things, how well you’re performing with certain keywords, your ads (if any), and the various landing pages and subpages of your website.
Based on your metrics, you can then decide to make adjustments. This allows you to refine your persona(s) and make corrections, enabling you to target your audience even more effectively. It may also be necessary to optimize your website to achieve a higher conversion rate.
