Last updated 1/28/2021

Launching a new brand—product or service—comes with a big risk. Understanding the market landscape will help you minimize that risk and allow you to focus your brand marketing efforts in the most cost-effective way possible. Identifying the right target audience for your brand is one of the most vital pieces of a marketing strategy. Strategies that are broad to begin with, are typically less successful than highly niche or targeted market segments.

Therefore, before you begin marketing efforts for your brand, you need to define your target audience—the specific group that you can expect to purchase your products or services. It will comprise your existing customers and potential customers.

This is slightly different from defining your target market, which consists of anyone who could be interested in your products or services. Target audience are the groups of people in which you want to focus your brand marketing efforts—whether it’s through a digital marketing campaign, advertisement or on social media through a social network.

According to the latest survey findings from Databox, target audience research was most helpful with content marketing, social media marketing and SEO efforts.

When you know your target audience and its pain points, you can craft content more effectively and focus advertisements with the right marketing message for each of those segments. It’s important to recognize that not all messages resonate the same way with various groups of people. In fact, marketers overwhelmingly agree that personalization helps advance customer relationships. Conversely, not knowing this valuable information could cost you a lot of wasted time and money.

Here are 5 ways to identify the right target audience for your brand:

1. Conduct market research

Begin with conducting market research to analyze all aspects of the market. You can achieve this through performing a SWOT analysis, which identifies a business’s strengths and weaknesses, along with opportunities and threats.

This type of market research can recognize:

• Location (local, national or international)
• Demographics (age, gender, occupation, income level, marital status)
• Psychographics (values, hobbies, lifestyle, personality, attitude, behavior)
• Industries (medical, accounting, lighting, nonprofit), if a B2B focus
• Market trends
• Economic shifts
• Customer’s buying habits
• Personality type (persona) and pain points
• Motivations
• Competition

Knowing all of the factors that contribute to your brand’s market and purchase path, is a critical first step to helping you identify the right target audience.

CMA utilizes a proprietary discovery process, Marketecture™, to engage in a strategic analysis, which helps its customers understand how their business can be best positioned in the marketplace. It analyzes a business’s customer’s pain points, buying motivations, competitive challenges and marketplace forces that impact its business.

Then, CMA orchestrates Marketecture insights into differentiated positioning, captivating sales messages and, ultimately, a game plan of tactics to get results for its clients. As part of that process, CMA develops a SWOT analysis, which identifies a business’s strengths and weaknesses, along with opportunities and threats. The firm also examines competitors and external influencers that could impact your brand in the upcoming year.

2. Understand purchase path and pain points

Branding is all about understanding the purchase path and pain points. As part of your market research, it’s important to pay particular attention not only to defining your target customers, but also knowing their different considerations to a purchase path, as well as pain points.

One way to approach this is to think like the customer and ask pertinent questions such as:

• How can I provide a solution to a problem?
• What goal does my target audience want to achieve?

This will allow you to craft personas, along with framing content that addresses those problems—centered around stages of the buying cycle (awareness, consideration and decision). Personas are fictional characters based on research, which help you to represent the different user types who might use your brand in a comparable way.

Creating personas will help you to understand your brand users’ needs and pain points. Tailored key messages and content that are specifically designed to speak to those personas will result in a higher likelihood of moving them down the sales funnel.

As you head into 2020, arming yourself with this information is vital. CMA experts shared in its Marketing Best Practices for 2020 blog, that a common trend throughout every best practice is the importance of personalized brand marketing, which will become even more developed in 2021 through linking data and content, while respecting a customer’s privacy.

3. Know your existing customers

One of the best ways to identify the right target audience for your brand is to learn about your existing customers—from demographics to preferences.

There are several avenues to explore including:

• Examining your social media and website analytics. This can help you understand who is visiting your site, how they navigate it and which website pages users are visiting the most. Also, know who’s interacting with your social media networks.

• Using tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Hubspot and Facebook Insights, to get extensive information about user responses.

4. Employ multi-segment (differentiated) marketing

This strategy is still considered in finding the right target audience (even if it’s within one product or segment target). Multi-segment marketing, leveraging digital marketing, social media, PR and content writing, aims to gain customers from different market segments to buy the same product for the same uses. It could be different decision makers along the sales funnel, who would receive different messaging, but contribute overall to the purchase or sale.

Some businesses sell the same product to more than one segment, due to its mass appeal, while others make several product lines that attract unique groups.

5. Don’t cast a net with a broad reach

Instead, identify those people who have a high potential to purchase your products or services. Niche marketing, which may start with one and grow quite large, will ensure that you begin with building brand loyalty.

You end up with people being excited about your product because it’s filling their needs. An added advantage is that they become brand evangelists and do some of the work for you. You’ll also learn a lot in the process. With those learnings, you’ll grow your brand.

Target Audience Case Study

CMA works with each of its customers to establish critical components of the overall marketing strategy, before any marketing campaign is developed or implemented, including identifying its target audience. The result is a more focused marketing campaign.

One example is a business to business (B2B) marketing campaign it built for Amerlux, an LED lighting manufacturer, to increase sales. Through a lead-generation program, encompassing many of CMA’s solutions including PR, social media, email marketing, SEO, web design, content marketing, video marketing and geo-targeting, CMA created a path to drive prospects down the sales funnel.

As part of the content marketing campaign, CMA developed blog posts that spoke specifically to various target audiences at different phases of the buy cycle. The blog-writing campaign positioned Amerlux as the solution to a range of problems directly or indirectly involving LED lighting.

Blog angles included:

• Smart cities
• Dark sky light pollution
• Less street crime
• Safer college campuses
• Bigger “bottom lines” through energy conservation
• How architects and contractors can dramatically reduce callbacks

The blog content was presented in different formats, to create a richer experience to a wider audience.

Topline results from the entire marketing campaign included driving 14,508 unique visitors to Amerlux.com, as well as 9,838 individuals to the “Locate Your Sales Rep” webpage. The campaign generated 348 leads. The New Jersey Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America recognized CMA with its gold award for that campaign.

In late 2019, CMA built landing pages for each Amerlux target market because their products have a broad customer range. CMA set up campaigns to drive its target audiences to each of the landing pages. In 2020, each landing page directed traffic to a more personalized experience on the company’s newly re-branded website.

Finally, the better you comprehend who your target audience is, the more closely you can align your marketing efforts and increase ROI. In addition, identifying your target audience will assist you in ascertaining which tactics to employ, to reach that audience. This will increase the chances of moving them to action.

Do you want to learn more about how to identify the right target audience for your brand? Contact us today, to get the conversation started.