Target Audience: A Complete Guide to Definition, Search, and Communication
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 8:25 am
If you understand your customers' pain points and can draw their attention and interest in the flow of information, you can sell everything on the Internet - even houses for several million rubles.
In this case, we described our experience working with real estate. It illustrates how a thoughtful approach to audience selection works - when you do not sell to everyone, but carefully study and write down individual segments.
In this material we share our agency experience:
we explain step by step how to correctly select a target audience, create an audience map and conduct a competitive analysis;
we provide comparative tables and diagrams, teach how to play secret agents;
we get into the heads of potential clients and find out what motivates them to buy;
We support the theory with our cases and the most striking advertising campaigns that have taken off on the Internet.
Selecting a target audience in 5 steps: theory
1. Understand why you are there for your audience
Determine who your customers are and what problems your taiyuan telephone number data product can solve for them. Each person has several levels of needs - superficial or deep. And to satisfy them, different categories of goods and services are needed.
How it works: For example, a client chooses a cafe. If he is tired and hungry after work, wants to eat quickly, tasty and inexpensively, he will go to a cafe near the metro or near work. An important criterion will be the presence of simple and understandable dishes on the menu, which you can eat for an affordable price. The second option: a person goes to an expensive restaurant and wants to spend time in the company of people of his circle. The main criterion when choosing will be the status of the establishment.
Understand what specific customer needs your product solves. And emphasize this in your advertising creatives.
Example from practice
For our client, the Donskoy cottage village, we used several experimental approaches with text. We divided the audience into segments — developed a large mental map — and thought out 3-4 creative options for each section. We got 2 approaches: rational and emotional. Then we tested each ad and looked at the indicators. The main sign of a successful text for us was requests to view the village.
As a result, rational ads with the headline "The last house left" and an emphasis on quality, comfort and reliability lost to the text that suggested living like in a movie. It brought in 13 leads.
Ad text that generated 13 leads
Here's an ad that brought in 13 leads.
“When you know who the people in the audience are: what their lives are like, what their daily experiences are, what their deepest emotions are; you can make sure that the presentation you give hits the mark.” — Excerpt from the book “No BS Guide to Powerful Presentations” by business consultants Dan S. Kennedy and Dustin Matthews.
The good news is that you don't have to be a member of your target audience to understand them.
2. Study each segment of the target audience from different angles
In this case, the information background, the environment in which your target audience lives, and the mentality of the country in which they live are very important. That is why good advertisers watch TV, sometimes go on reconnaissance to places that are unusual for them, and communicate in places where they have never appeared before, even in their thoughts. You can be a businesswoman, but if you sell goods to housewives who are keen on decoupage, you need to understand how they communicate, what they are interested in, what problems they have, and how they solve them.
Once we sold the most common dumplings and sausages. How to sell a product that does not have a clearly expressed difference from the competition? We started with research. We decided to sell dumplings to men and sausages to women - we studied the audience, packaged the product in short advertising texts that hit the target audience's desires and pain points, and we were right.
The dumplings were offered to men. The slogan "Food for alpha males" worked well for them, and the additional mention that these dumplings were handmade only increased their desire to buy a special, healthy product.
Typical "pains" of women are fears of being a bad housewife and concern about the quality and usefulness of food, especially for children. We played on this and offered housewives to buy dietary sausages made from natural meat without additives, which can be eaten by children.
We could have offered both products to everyone: sausages to men and dumplings to women. But we took a different approach - we researched the audience's motives, their doubts and fears. And our approach worked.
A detailed note on working with creatives in targeted advertising for those who are struggling with the concept of an advertising campaign.
Eva Katz , managing partner of the 5 o'click agency:
"Finding a suitable employee solves problems well. If we make posts for a bank that is aimed at religious people - and we have had this in our practice - then we hire a deeply Orthodox copywriter.
The background and understanding of the topic are very important. A professional will immerse himself in the topic in a few hours. Advertisers, like good actors, know how to get into different characters and try on someone else's way of life."
Use psychological triggers
In one of their first campaigns, Apple used the slogan "Think Different." For many people, this phrase is a powerful trigger, because it is incredibly pleasant to feel different from everyone else. You want to stand out in everything, even in your laptop model. And although today the MacBook has become mainstream, at the time the advertisement made a splash, and thousands of people thought "yes, I am special, I need Apple."
Many men are attracted to sexual images (to the question of why a beauty in overalls is winking from a billboard of a hardware store). And girls who spend a lot of time on social networks are driven by the desire to be stylish and like their idols.
Kennedy and Matthews highlighted key questions in the book as points for building a successful advertising strategy. Answer them and you will receive tools to influence your audience:
10 Essential Questions a Marketer Should Know the Answers to for Any Target Audience, for Any Advertising, Promotion, Persuasion or Influence No Matter How You Want to Do It
What experiences keep them awake at night?
What are they afraid of?
What makes them angry? Who makes them angry?
What are the 3 things that most irritate them on a daily basis?
What trends are happening and will happen in their business or life?
What do they secretly, ardently desire most of all?
Is there a built-in mechanism in how they make decisions? (Example: engineers = purely analytical and calculating).
What language are they used to communicating in?
Who else sells something similar to your product and how?
Who else tried to sell them something like this and why did they fail?
In this case, we described our experience working with real estate. It illustrates how a thoughtful approach to audience selection works - when you do not sell to everyone, but carefully study and write down individual segments.
In this material we share our agency experience:
we explain step by step how to correctly select a target audience, create an audience map and conduct a competitive analysis;
we provide comparative tables and diagrams, teach how to play secret agents;
we get into the heads of potential clients and find out what motivates them to buy;
We support the theory with our cases and the most striking advertising campaigns that have taken off on the Internet.
Selecting a target audience in 5 steps: theory
1. Understand why you are there for your audience
Determine who your customers are and what problems your taiyuan telephone number data product can solve for them. Each person has several levels of needs - superficial or deep. And to satisfy them, different categories of goods and services are needed.
How it works: For example, a client chooses a cafe. If he is tired and hungry after work, wants to eat quickly, tasty and inexpensively, he will go to a cafe near the metro or near work. An important criterion will be the presence of simple and understandable dishes on the menu, which you can eat for an affordable price. The second option: a person goes to an expensive restaurant and wants to spend time in the company of people of his circle. The main criterion when choosing will be the status of the establishment.
Understand what specific customer needs your product solves. And emphasize this in your advertising creatives.
Example from practice
For our client, the Donskoy cottage village, we used several experimental approaches with text. We divided the audience into segments — developed a large mental map — and thought out 3-4 creative options for each section. We got 2 approaches: rational and emotional. Then we tested each ad and looked at the indicators. The main sign of a successful text for us was requests to view the village.
As a result, rational ads with the headline "The last house left" and an emphasis on quality, comfort and reliability lost to the text that suggested living like in a movie. It brought in 13 leads.
Ad text that generated 13 leads
Here's an ad that brought in 13 leads.
“When you know who the people in the audience are: what their lives are like, what their daily experiences are, what their deepest emotions are; you can make sure that the presentation you give hits the mark.” — Excerpt from the book “No BS Guide to Powerful Presentations” by business consultants Dan S. Kennedy and Dustin Matthews.
The good news is that you don't have to be a member of your target audience to understand them.
2. Study each segment of the target audience from different angles
In this case, the information background, the environment in which your target audience lives, and the mentality of the country in which they live are very important. That is why good advertisers watch TV, sometimes go on reconnaissance to places that are unusual for them, and communicate in places where they have never appeared before, even in their thoughts. You can be a businesswoman, but if you sell goods to housewives who are keen on decoupage, you need to understand how they communicate, what they are interested in, what problems they have, and how they solve them.
Once we sold the most common dumplings and sausages. How to sell a product that does not have a clearly expressed difference from the competition? We started with research. We decided to sell dumplings to men and sausages to women - we studied the audience, packaged the product in short advertising texts that hit the target audience's desires and pain points, and we were right.
The dumplings were offered to men. The slogan "Food for alpha males" worked well for them, and the additional mention that these dumplings were handmade only increased their desire to buy a special, healthy product.
Typical "pains" of women are fears of being a bad housewife and concern about the quality and usefulness of food, especially for children. We played on this and offered housewives to buy dietary sausages made from natural meat without additives, which can be eaten by children.
We could have offered both products to everyone: sausages to men and dumplings to women. But we took a different approach - we researched the audience's motives, their doubts and fears. And our approach worked.
A detailed note on working with creatives in targeted advertising for those who are struggling with the concept of an advertising campaign.
Eva Katz , managing partner of the 5 o'click agency:
"Finding a suitable employee solves problems well. If we make posts for a bank that is aimed at religious people - and we have had this in our practice - then we hire a deeply Orthodox copywriter.
The background and understanding of the topic are very important. A professional will immerse himself in the topic in a few hours. Advertisers, like good actors, know how to get into different characters and try on someone else's way of life."
Use psychological triggers
In one of their first campaigns, Apple used the slogan "Think Different." For many people, this phrase is a powerful trigger, because it is incredibly pleasant to feel different from everyone else. You want to stand out in everything, even in your laptop model. And although today the MacBook has become mainstream, at the time the advertisement made a splash, and thousands of people thought "yes, I am special, I need Apple."
Many men are attracted to sexual images (to the question of why a beauty in overalls is winking from a billboard of a hardware store). And girls who spend a lot of time on social networks are driven by the desire to be stylish and like their idols.
Kennedy and Matthews highlighted key questions in the book as points for building a successful advertising strategy. Answer them and you will receive tools to influence your audience:
10 Essential Questions a Marketer Should Know the Answers to for Any Target Audience, for Any Advertising, Promotion, Persuasion or Influence No Matter How You Want to Do It
What experiences keep them awake at night?
What are they afraid of?
What makes them angry? Who makes them angry?
What are the 3 things that most irritate them on a daily basis?
What trends are happening and will happen in their business or life?
What do they secretly, ardently desire most of all?
Is there a built-in mechanism in how they make decisions? (Example: engineers = purely analytical and calculating).
What language are they used to communicating in?
Who else sells something similar to your product and how?
Who else tried to sell them something like this and why did they fail?