Target audience research: how to find & understand yours

Without a firm understanding of who your target audience is, your products and services have nowhere to go, and your brand has no one to speak to. If you’re not sure how to conduct audience research or how to find audience demographics that will be helpful to your business, Clear Channel can help. Read on to demystify the process of discovering your target audience, and learn how you can use this information to engage with your customers on a deeper level.

Defining Your Target Audience

Before you can research your target audience you have to be able to define exactly who they are. Your target audience consists of the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. When you look at all of the problems that your products or services can solve, as yourself who is most likely to be struggling with this problem? For example, if you make suncream, look at people who frequently travel to sunny locations. If you design maternity wear, look to expectant mothers and their family and friends.

Most of the time your target audience is obvious - but sometimes it comes to light after more thorough investigation. If you’re asking yourself what is the importance of audience research when your target audience seems clear, consider this - it’s better to prove your guesses right, than discover that you’ve wasted time and money preaching to the wrong choir.

Once you have a broad idea of who your target audience is, you can start to break this down into more specific audience demographics, sorting people by age, gender, location, income and other relevant information. Then you’re ready to conduct demographic analysis.

Research Methods

Here are some methods for how to research your target audience.

• Conducting one-on-one customer interviews to gain qualitative insight into how they feel about your business, and why they interact with it in the way they do.

• Monitoring social media to see how and why your brand is mentioned, discussed, and to track trends relating to your brand, industry and products.

• Organising focus groups to use a small selection of individuals as a research sample, asking them questions about their experiences with your brand.

• Using analytics tools to look at the traffic to your website and highlight any useful patterns.

Creating buyer personas

Buyer personas consist of all of the information about your target audience demographics organised into neat profiles of fictional customers. They’re incredibly important to making sure your marketing efforts are effective at every stage of the customer journey.

Conducting Demographic Analysis 

Demographic analysis involves gathering and analysing data related to the characteristics of your target audience. Here’s an example.

You’re preparing to launch a luxury ground coffee. Through demographic analysis you discover that the audience demographic most likely to convert into customers for this coffee are men aged between 35-50, who live in affluent rural areas. This gives you a specific target audience to cater your marketing efforts to.

You can carry out demographic analysis through methods such as examining historical data, A/B testing, and carrying out surveys of your existing customers.

Exploring Psychographic Factors  

Psychographics refer to the attitudes, values and interests of your audience. If you’re looking to tap into your target audience’s emotions, this is the way to do it. Emotional marketing has been proven to be effective, and can provoke a strong response from your target audience demographics.

At the moment, a great example of an emotive subject is sustainability and ethical practices. A relevant, emotional subject, these things can heavily influence people’s opinions on brands and products, and how likely they are to interact with them. If you find out that your target audience are likely to be very concerned with ecofriendliness, you can leverage this information to endear them to your brand.

Leveraging Behavioural Data 

Imagine an online retailer tracks customer behaviour on their website and finds that visitors who view a particular product are likely to do so multiple times over a period of weeks before actually making a purchase. Using this information, the retailer could design an email campaign based around reminding these site visitors to complete their transaction.

This is an example of leveraging behavioural data. Once you see patterns in what your target audience are doing, and understand why they do it, you can use this information to predict what they’re likely to do next when faced with certain prompts and base your Out of Home campaign around this concept.

Analysing Market Trends

There are other things that can influence the behaviour of your target audience, such as market trends. Analysing market trends allows you to identify opportunities for growth and anticipate changes in the behaviour of your audience demographics. This is an important way to stay one step ahead of your competition. 

In order to be free to capitalise on market trends it’s important to keep your marketing strategies reasonably flexible. Being able to pivot in a new direction at relatively short notice can make the difference between being able to ride a wave of success or missing the boat.

Partnering with Clear Channel for Targeted Campaigns 

If you need help with how to find audience demographics and target them effectively in your OOH campaigns, Clear Channel has an excellent range of tools on hand to help you. Clear Channel can provide insight on everything from audience profiling to behavioural research and beyond, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and see what we can do for you.