Before moving forward to setting up your marketing strategy, it’s important to determine your target market first. By following this, you’ll be able to target the right audience and market your products or services with the right marketing campaigns, tailored to the needs of each audience. Also, by determining your target market, you will understand how to invest your money wisely and focus on people who are most likely to buy from you.
Customise your marketing strategy to reach people who are
most likely to take the desired actions you want.
Types of target market
There are two main target market types. Your primary target market and your secondary target market. Your primary target market group shall receive the most of your attention. This group includes your most valuable clients. Thus, a big percentage of your overall marketing efforts and budget should be invested in it.
Your secondary target market is any other group of people who share similar characteristics with your primary target market. These groups are not likely to become your most valuable clients but they can help in the configuration/formation of your marketing strategy. They’re also useful to determine if your products or services may appeal to different groups of people. Therefore, a small percentage of your overall marketing efforts and budget should be invested in it.
How to determine your digital target market?
- Monitor your social media audience
Take a quick look at the people who follow and interact with your brand on social media. Use the following questions to narrow down your target market:
- Age: How old are they? Segment them into age groups and see which age group/s is the most crowded.
- Status: What is their financial status? Are they business owners/employees/university students/retirees? Are they married/single?
- Location: Where do they live? Are they near you? Is your physical shop/office near them?
- Interests: What are their interests/hobbies? How their interests/hobbies relate with your products or services?
- Other: Any other parameters, specific to your business and industry, that you think are important to identify your target market.
- Understand why your social media audience follows your social media accounts
Do they want to keep themselves updated with your products or services? Have they become your followers after they have talked with you? Do they follow you because they are your competitors? How do they interact with your posts?
Once you understand why they follow you and why they are there, you can determine your target market and tailor your social media marketing strategy to get the most out of it.
- Monitor trends
Which are the specific things that your audience is interested and talks about? Are these things products or services related to yours or not? Do they belong in certain groups of people? Which are these groups? Do they use specific hashtags when they talk? In general, you should keep track of things that your audience likes/shares/comments/interacts/finds interesting etc.
Monitoring trends can be as simple as tracking conversations, keywords and hashtags. If your audience uses the same phrasings, do regular searches on those phrases to see where your brand fits into their big picture. You should also search for relevant hashtags on Instagram and Twitter since people often organise conversations around them. With this way, you can keep track of what people are posting and what their interests are.
What’s next?
Customise your marketing strategy to reach people who are most likely to take the desired actions you want.
Create ads that specifically target the profile of your audience. This could be based on age, gender, location and other demographic information.
Use your ad data to continue refining your message for your target market. Pair your mission with your message.
The mega tool to determine your digital target market
Google analytics uses the Google platform to tell you what your website visitors are doing on your website throughout the day.
With Google analytics you can export almost any data analysis you wish. The platform gives a plethora of predetermined data analytics as well as the opportunity to create your own data sheets to completely cover your needs. For the sake of identifying your target market, you can:
- compare your social media accounts by traffic
- identify which social media account is performing better in terms of highest results and conversion rates
- learn how people are interacting with your website
- identify the most visited pages
- go check your website bounce rate and, if needed, make the necessary improvements to make your website visitors navigate through the pages of your website. Your current bounce rate gives you the rate of real engagement with your website (i.e. 56% bounce rate means that from all your visitors, the 46% were in a way engaged with your website)
- go through your organic search
- examine your acquisition overview
- inspect your engagement overview, focusing on pages and screens views and identify why some pages rank higher than others to make the relevant developments
- check your organic search in relation to visitors who reach your website directly or through referrals
- check the average engagement time per user and see how much time a user spends in your website in average
- and most importantly, check the user activity by cohort. This measurement shows how well you manage to retain your website users. It shows the number of people who repeatedly visit your website. With this metric you can understand how many people trust your website as a source of information or as a point of sales. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, your opportunities and threats and make the necessary developments to retain more users on your website.
Have you got any questions or a digital project in mind and would like to start strong? Drop us a line to arrange a meeting.