Target audience age groups. What is the target audience (TA) and how to determine it: examples and methods

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Many novice entrepreneurs, when opening their first (and sometimes second or third) small business, begin by creating a website, public pages, logo, and drawing up a content plan, completely forgetting about the most important things. More precisely, they think that they haven’t forgotten, but in fact, they only spent 10 minutes on this important thing.

I'm talking about target audience analysis. How is it usually made? “We sell men’s watches, which means our audience is men over 30 from large cities and with good income.” Remembered, secured, let's go.

Such an analysis is, at a minimum, useless, and at a maximum, destructive for business. A real analysis of the target audience needs to be carried out thoughtfully, intelligently and carefully, and periodically reviewed when releasing a new product or service. Why? Because the target audience is not the average person of a certain age with a certain amount of money in their pocket. There are many people, they have even more interests, which means that the needs of these social groups vary significantly.

You need to start defining your target audience with the question: what are you selling? Yes, yes, exactly from him. Because you will need to understand who will want to buy your product or service and why.

Having clearly formulated your proposal, highlight its advantages and benefits. As an example, I’ll take one of our products in Puzzle English (you can see the website by clicking the link to understand what will be discussed next) – a subscription for learning English online. What are its advantages? You can study from home, at any time, build your own training, devoting from a few minutes to a couple of hours a day. Price? Lower prices for lessons via Skype or in school. Complexity? Relatively low, but you will need computer and video player skills.

This is a brief description of only one product; for a full study of the target audience, you need to do the same for each of your proposals.

Here is a short cheat sheet on the characteristics that definitely need to be highlighted when analyzing your target audience:

for B2C (sales to ordinary customers)

1. Geographical: where they live, where they work, where they consume your product or service (at home, in a cafe, on the street, in the country, etc.)
2. Demographic: marital status, number of family members, gender, age, nationality, who they work for, what education they have
3. Economic: do they work or not, how much do they earn, is there any savings?
4. Psychological: what kind of temperament they have, what social group they belong to, what distinctive character traits they have (it is not necessary to list everything), what life position they adhere to, what kind of lifestyle they lead - sedentary, mobile, active, what value system they have
5. Behavioral: how loyal and committed are they to the brand (brand), how often do they use the product or service, are they receptive to promotions

for B2B (sales to companies - corporate sales)

1. Line of business: what is the subject of business
2. Geographical: where they do business
3. Economic: financial indicators of business (turnover, income)
4. Business development forecast: market condition, trends, expectations
5. Decision making in the company: who makes the decision on concluding a contract, payment, how and with whom communications will need to be built

When creating a portrait of your target audience, try to describe in detail the average representative of each segment. Leave the data that is useful to you and that carries a semantic load, remove anything completely abstract from your business, for example, if you sell country houses, people who do not have a personal car are unlikely to be interested in them. Describe what this person does in his free time, what he reads, what he watches; what is his level of education, how often does he travel abroad (this affects the breadth of his horizons), and so on.

There will be several segments - few businesses are so highly specialized that they are limited to just one. You need to unite the audience into one segment based on general characteristics; define them yourself for your business. At Puzzle English we segment by time of use, gender, employment, marital status. Below is an example of a description of two segments.

Then, to identify the needs of our target audiences, we use the methodology 5W:

• What - What? We describe the product for each segment. What can you offer them? How will the product look from their point of view?
• Who - Who? Who is purchasing the product? Describe the portrait in full: men, women, age, social status.
• Why - Why? Why do customers buy a product/service in your category? What guides the choice? What are the key product characteristics for them?
• When - When? When do people usually buy your product? Is it seasonal? Does it depend on the time of day or day of the week?
• Where - Where? Where is your product or service offered?

Take this model, one target audience segment and answer each question in detail. Then do the same with the second segment, and so on, until you have a clear understanding of each target audience and their actual or potential interaction with your business.

For example, our subscriptions are of interest to employees of small and medium-sized businesses aged 24 to 35 who have recently graduated from universities, who want to improve their English for a career or travel, can study in their free time - 10-30 minutes a day, do this with mobile and tablet devices, have average and below average income, so they are interested in saving on education. Competitors offer courses that are either too fundamental or too expensive, as well as lessons via Skype, for which you need to allocate 2 hours a day a couple of times a week. This segment is most interested in purchasing from September to March, after which the holiday and summer cottage season begins.

The subscription is also interesting for mothers of 30-40 years old on maternity leave, who want to use the time free from caring for the child to their advantage, but cannot be absent for a long time. For them, the online format of classes is ideal - you can study even for 10 minutes a day, there is an opportunity to be distracted at any time, since training is implemented through short videos and short training sessions and games. They study from a home computer or tablet, mainly in winter and spring (peak birth rate is September, the first months are off, summer is vacation). Price is important for them, since the main expenses are for the child. Skype classes or long courses are not suitable for them due to the need to allocate large periods of time to study.

We have several more target audiences, but I cite these two as the most striking example.

Where to get information for target audience research? Conduct surveys of your existing audience; look at website and social media analytics; study the audience of your closest competitors; finally, use personal observations of the people around you.

Once you have several detailed descriptions of your target audience, you can begin to draw up a marketing plan to promote your products and services. And this is where such a detailed description of the audience will come in handy for:

1. Budget savings - the more accurately you meet the client’s needs, the more likely he is to make a purchase from you.
2. Save time - instead of testing standard selling phrases and posts, you will immediately use what will potentially interest future clients. There will be more transitions, which means there will be more sales in the future.
3. Planning a content strategy - writing about everything and for everyone is costly and pointless. Nobody needs general words anymore; the Internet is full of information for every taste and color. But there is not so much really useful content for specific needs, and you can play on this. Don't write a review of your service for finding nearby restaurants - rather tell how it will help a busy businesswoman quickly find a place for a business lunch.

Narrow segmentation of your target audience will also be useful for setting up an e-mail newsletter: people don’t like spam, but they will be happy to consider offers specifically tailored to their needs. A young unemployed guy of about 30 years old, living in St. Petersburg and wielding an iPhone, most likely will not be interested in material about the process of making your expensive suits, but will want to read about how to choose clothes for a successful interview.

In the same way, target audience analysis helps in working on external content marketing: based on the data obtained about your potential buyers, you will select resources for posting native and advertising materials.

For example, as a high-tech project, we cover resources like vc.ru, GeekTimes, hi-news; as a service convenient for mothers on maternity leave (and also selling English courses for children), we are posted on women’s and parent’s websites; as a resource for the young and active, we are promoting ourselves on Lifehacker and The Village, and so on.

Native and regular advertising are expensive formats, so clearly reaching the target audience is even more important here. There is no point in writing a column on Cossa if your promotion is primarily offline; and vice versa, you definitely need to use Geektimes, Habrahabr, Netology if you are selling something for developers and programmers.

Narrow segmentation is talked about at every turn, and this is justified - it really brings results, allows you to save huge budgets and a lot of time, and works faster and better than conventional segmentation based on 2-3 parameters.

Save this post to yourself, create portraits by segment and build a marketing strategy according to this in-depth analysis. Then there will be sales, loyalty, and mutual love with customers.

Subscribe to the channel about freelancing and remote work Remote&Freelance and learn how to monetize what you love, work remotely and travel.

A business without a client is an unprofitable business. Starting your own business and peacefully waiting for people to come and give their money is not the best idea. Due to high competition in the market for goods and services, an entrepreneur must meet his consumers halfway. You need to find them first. We will give answers to two pressing questions: what is the target audience and how to distinguish your client from the general mass of consumers.

Concept of target audience

Knowing the typical profile of his consumer, the seller can set certain advertising criteria and find a potential client. This does not mean that if a businessman does not know how to find the target audience, then his business will face complete failure. But it is a fact that the costs of an advertising campaign will be unjustified and ineffective.

Types of target audience

Analysis of the target audience led to the conclusion that it is divided into several main types. In modern marketing, when asked what target audiences are, you can get different and sometimes contradictory answers. The most realistic is the following classification:

• Main and key target audience.
• Wide and narrow.
• Audience depending on the type of target group.

Main target audience of the project

People who make decisions about purchasing a product. The key one activates the solution of the main one. To make it more clear, we can give an example. For children's products, the main target audience is children, and the key target is their parents.

If we say that the target audience, the types of which are based on the reach of consumers, depends on the breadth of the range of goods, then this will be completely wrong. For example, a broad target audience includes consumers who prefer to drink coffee, and a narrow target audience includes those who drink only black insoluble coffee drink. To find out how to determine the target audience, this data will be very small, regardless of the range of products or services.

The audience, depending on the type of target group, is of two types: in the field of business (b2b) and b2c consumption. Finding a target audience in the b2b field is much easier, since all information about business needs is online. If you need to sell products to the end consumer, then you will need to find out the parameters of the target audience.

When the need to highlight the target audience is due to website promotion, you can supplement the types of target audiences with one more item - the audience for the purpose of visiting the site. To determine the target audience of the site, first determine for what purpose the user comes to it: to study content or to purchase a product. Having an idea of ​​what the target audience of the site looks like, you can more accurately direct the information and advertising impact on the person.

Target audience segmentation

Determining the target audience is impossible without segmenting it. Segmentation of the target audience is the division of the total mass of clients into separate groups according to similar or analogous parameters, identifying their needs and creating a commercial offer that will be of interest to these groups.

Segmenting the target audience helps to perform cluster analysis. Determining the target segment is done by many methods, but the most popular of them is Mark Sherrington’s method. It is most often used in marketing. Books on this topic describe a theory called “5W”.

Target audience segments are determined by 5 questions:

• What do we sell (What)?
• Who will buy (Who)?
• Why should a person buy (Why)?
• When should he make the purchase (When)?
• Where can the buyer purchase the product (Where)?

If you figure out what each of these means and what benefits it brings, you will end up with a clear description of each group of potential buyers. Here is a table based on a classic example from a marketing book.

Studying the target audience will allow you to identify a key segment of consumers, as well as analyze the client base of competitors. Label the columns of the table with questions from Sherrington’s methodology and write down sequentially the ways to segment competitors horizontally. The size of the table depends only on the level of competition in the area of ​​the promoted business. But the more companies are analyzed using this method, the better.

A clear study of the target audience will bring your business to the proper level.

Researching the target audience using the 5W method, despite its simplicity, has an undoubted advantage. It allows you to create advertising targeted to each group of interested buyers. If the analysis data of the selected segment is identified correctly, then product promotion can be built based on the basic needs of the target audience.

How to create a portrait of your target audience

A portrait of a typical buyer will help determine the characteristics of the target audience. To have a more accurate understanding of the consumer, define his parameters:

• demographic;
• social and economic;
• geographical;
• psychological;
• behavioral characteristics.

Finding a target audience primarily depends on the demographic parameters of the person. They mean: gender, age, nationality, marital status, presence of children and preferably their age. Here we can add the sphere of human activity.

Social and economic parameters help to attract the target audience, taking into account its purchasing power. As basic characteristics, books on marketing suggest considering: education, salary level, employment, sources of income.

Many convenient services have been developed to search for the target audience.

Geolocation allows you to save a lot on advertising. The selection of the target audience should be made in the company's service areas. Otherwise, money will be spent on advertising, and the product will never find its buyer. The location of the client also influences his needs. For example, in warm countries the demand for skis will clearly be extremely low.

The target audience of advertising is directly related to the psychological aspects of the individual. The lion's share of products are chosen due to the emotional perception of advertising. It can evoke interest, nostalgia, tenderness, and so on. Therefore, the preparation of an advertisement depends on: lifestyle, values, life principles, the presence of idols, unfulfilled desires of a potential buyer.

Behavioral segmentation is the determination of those factors that can describe the motivation for choice, the moment of purchase and use of the product. Classic books on Internet promotion highlight several basic parameters of behavioral characteristics:

• purchase motivation;
• reason for contacting the company;
• customer expectations from the purchase;
• involvement in the products offered;
• attitude towards the brand and so on.

When first writing a description of the target audience, it is advisable to use as much information as possible. If you can’t find the right words, you can choose a synonym for each epithet in the description. Sometimes the chosen synonym fits the description of a person better than the original word.

How to choose your target audience?

The main rule for advertisers creating a profile of a potential buyer is to use more specifics in the description. The one who finds the distinctive features of his customer will get to him earlier than the entrepreneur with an abstract perception of the customer.

If there is not a single difference between one buyer and another, then it is best to create several portraits of the target audience, rather than lumping everything into one pile. This will make it much easier to identify the core of the target audience. The core of the target audience is a group of the most active and important buyers. This group of people brings in most of the company's profits and has a high level of demand for the products it represents.

Be attentive to your target audience, and they will bring income to your business.

The last piece of advice that will make it easier to find a target audience is to get rid of stereotypes when drawing up a consumer portrait. Stereotypes live in everyone and their source can be books, films, environment, etc. Some potential consumers may remain unnoticed.
Selection of the target audience is the most important point on which the work of the advertising campaign as a whole depends. It cannot be classified as a one-time event. The parameters of the target audience change along with the needs of the person, which forces them to be worked out before each large-scale advertising campaign.

When planning to launch a new ambitious startup, develop an existing one, or establish reliable reasons for the growth or decline in the profitability of an enterprise, it would be correct to start with an analysis of the target audience. This will require a lot of work, but there is no need to be afraid. If done correctly, this process will not take much time and will become the basis for long-term and sustainable success.

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Target audience research

A group of people who will spend their income on a product or service offered by a particular company is what it is. And, of course, not knowing them by sight is simply a crime.

Fact! The percentage of unaccounted for, so-called random buyers or customers can reach up to 25%.

On the path to establishing the truth, most entrepreneurs face two main obstacles:

1. Ignorance of target audience research methods and fear of its scale.
2. Mistakes in identifying “implicit” potential customers who can play a leading role in the success of your business.

Let's look at a few simple techniques that will minimize the risk of failure:

• Collect as much information as possible about who might become your potential buyer or client. If you do not have money for expensive research conducted by marketing and consulting agencies, then use the simplest, free and effective methods:
• Interview all your friends, relatives and acquaintances.
• Conduct mini-surveys on forums, on social networks or on your own blog, the topic of which should correspond to the business idea.
• If this is an online business, then you can collect the necessary information through the “registration” block; the main thing is to correctly and unobtrusively include a sufficient number of criteria in it. To make people happy spending time on this, be sure to offer them a good discount, gift or bonus on their first order.

Key questions to be answered by the study

1. Who is my potential client? This issue includes gender, age, education level and profession.
2. What kind of life does he lead? For example, today's youth prefer to shop online or in branded boutiques, but this is for premium class goods. For the middle class, online shopping is seen as an opportunity to compare and choose the optimal combination of price and quality.
3. A block of individual questions that is closely related to the services or goods offered. For example, for tutoring services, it is of great importance: where the student studies, where he plans to enroll, what level of academic performance he has, what income the parents have, and what goal the parents or children pursue when ordering this or that service. Such questions will help the teacher adjust the curriculum, increase the number of positive recommendations, which will undoubtedly play a good role in promoting the business.

Methods for analyzing data obtained about the target audience

Having received the data, it is important not to miss the chance to correctly group and analyze it to fully understand the personal characteristics of a potential client. Knowing him by sight, you can make a unique offer that a person from this target group cannot refuse.

Important! The basis of the analysis is to identify the core of the target audience and the groups that it forms.

The core is that part of the target audience to which the entire business concept will be oriented.

The core of the target audience must be fully consistent with the company's overall marketing strategy.

Before starting the analysis, it is necessary to carry out a procedure for segmenting or clustering the audience, that is, dividing it into private subgroups united by common characteristics.

To carry out segmentation correctly, it is necessary to take into account dozens of factors such as:

• contact history,
• social status,
• preferences,
• education,
• income level,
• gender, age, etc.

Important! The more factors a marketer takes into account, the higher the value of the results obtained.

Electronic algorithms are often used for segmentation, the description of which is widely presented on the Internet and in the literature:

• CLOPE,
• Kohonen maps,
• nearest neighbor method.

Separately, it is recommended to consider potential clients in the b2b and b2c sectors, since the approaches to working with individuals and legal entities are diametrically opposed. After all, when dealing with a specific person, we make an offer in which he is directly interested. It is impossible for a company to make a targeted proposal, since on the way to the main decision maker we will have to go through many obstacles in the form of people who are often completely unmotivated to optimize a particular process in the enterprise.

Impact on the target audience

After segmenting the target audience to promote a service or product, you will need to develop. It will be based on an advertising campaign, which should be aimed at stimulating sales.

In this article, we will consider techniques for influencing and persuading potential clients. Let's take as a basis the theory of Dave Straker, who is the developer of most of these techniques and the creator of the popular website changingminds.org in Europe and the USA, as well as the author of many books on similar topics.

Confidence theory

By putting a confident tone into a thought, you give it the opportunity to penetrate into the minds of other people as the only true and truthful one. If you say something with doubt, then they are unlikely to believe you.

Scarcity = promotion

The essence of this manipulation is as follows - goods or services become much more attractive to customers if you inform them that their quantity is limited or the duration of the special offer is limited. An advertisement might say, for example, “All shoes are on sale with a 35% discount.” The promotion is valid only during May 1st!

Sleeper technique

It is based on the fact that if an advertising video (or other type of message) for a potential client does not contain a direct indication of the purchase of a service, then it will gradually increase his loyalty to such advertising, and, accordingly, to the product.

Attention! For any industry or sector of the economy, these rules will remain relevant for many years, as they appeal to simple human needs for respect, leadership and communication.

conclusions

Analysis and further impact on the target audience is complex and painstaking work, requiring care and precision and, at the same time, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. This is the only way to segment the target audience and direct marketing, and marketing in general, in the right direction.

Surveys and tests are simple and accessible methods for researching the target audience. Their serious drawback is that users know that they are being watched. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this fact affects the behavior of the subjects and the results.

This article contains 5 clever ways to study clients without their knowledge, but legally.

Trick one: analyze chat logs

Calls to technical support, recordings or logs of live chats are an unbiased opinion of users who have encountered a problem, are experiencing a service or want to buy a product.

People communicate openly when they are impersonal. With surveys you won’t achieve such frankness - clients will always keep themselves within limits.

And the crowning glory of this is that you don’t even need to lure people in to get valuable insights.

The main conditions: there is a person sitting on the other side, the chat is available at least during working hours. Like we have:

What to pay attention to when analyzing chat logs?

• Look for repetition: words, phrases, questions, expressions, assumptions.
• Look for commonalities to understand what topics people care about.
• Define categories and count the frequency of requests.

Voila! You have on your hands the top problems that concern visitors most. This information will save you a lot of effort and money. For example, this will help you understand what to write about in a blog or how to write an FAQ to remove friction.

Trick two: look for useful information in reviews and testimonials

A common business mistake is to limit feedback to ratings and ratings, without further ado. Most often these are useless stars; they do not convince anyone. If you get a bunch of units, they will be careful not to come to you. But you will never know why this happened, because no one wrote anything. And if you were given high marks, you won’t learn anything either - why they like you, what’s special about your business, etc.

There are several options for the correct review format. For example, like this:

Or like this:

You will learn what to improve, what to work on, and what you can be proud of)

Please note that a person will be too lazy to leave a quality review just like that, without the promise of something pleasant in return. Offer a discount, coupon, or something similar. Such a system is easy to implement, and it will not hit your pocket hard.

You can offer intangible benefits. For example, the title of best commentator or some kind of insignia for activity. The user's ambitions will do the rest for you. This system works great on Amazon. The best reviews (the most commented) are included in the Top:

The third option is to offer access to premium site features or services. This is more often true for SaaS companies, but stores can also choose this option. Like Zappos does it, for example. Whoever writes the most high-quality reviews gets access to the VIP level with super-fast delivery.

We can tell users a couple of rules, like Decathlon:

Trick three: talk to customers

There are many things you can ask in an interview. They can be carried out either in person or over the phone. Remote ones will cost less, but a personal conversation will allow you to monitor body language, facial expressions and read other non-verbal signs.

Meetings take a lot of time and can be expensive, especially if you have an online business and an audience in different parts of the world.

An alternative is to call on Skype or another instant messenger. Prepare: make a plan, come up with questions. Select respondents from current or potential clients. They've already interacted with you, which means they like what you offer. Be natural so that your interlocutors feel at ease.

Ask how they use the products, what worries and motivates them, what they think about you. You can also ask about competitors. It is necessary not only to find out the answers, but also to establish a trusting relationship.

Analyze conversations the same way you would analyze logs - comb through them for repeated phrases.

Trick four: “listen” on social networks

Your customers love social media. They listen to music, read news and chat. This includes sharing their impressions of products and services. Please note that users do this of their own free will and in most cases without bias. They use lively language, clever words and express valuable opinions. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you monitor mentions of you on social networks and blogs. Special tools will help.

One of them is the Babkee system:

With the free plan, you can monitor two objects and receive up to 3 thousand messages for each.

We set the monitoring object, enter keywords, add negative keywords - and get a list of links to sources with mentions.

Another example is the Cerebro service, which allows you to parse the VKontakte audience. You find communities by keyword and analyze discussions in each of them:

Pay attention to the topics with the words “Feedback” and “Questions”. You upload all links to discussions or the text of posts in an excel file and copy them manually into an SEO analyzer to estimate the frequency of mentions.

Trick five: study blogs and forums

Forums and blogs are the second level of immersion after social networks. This is where there is tons of criticism and revelations. This source is especially suitable for a niche product.