Defining and researching your target market is one of the most important steps in any campaign.
If you want to lead a successful marketing campaign, you need to know your target audience, inside and out. Researching demographics will help you ensure you’re targeting the right people, and deepening your understanding will help you choose the right channels, adjust your messaging, and improve your chances of success overall.
The question is, how can you define and research your target market?
Choosing Candidate Demographics
Your first job is generating a list of target demographics you might want to appeal to. You’ll need to consider a number of different variables, including age, gender, background, job, salary, family status, education, and geographic location. Try to choose an assortment of different possibilities, so you have more options to work with when you begin your research. It’s also a good idea to look at who your competitors are targeting; depending on your strategy, you may want to mimic your competitors’ approaches, or you may want to strongly differentiate yourself.
In any case, take the time to develop customer personas for these target demographics. These will guide your research, and give you foundations you can use to flesh out your strategy.
Digging Into Market Research
Next, you’ll need to spend time actively researching your target demographics. You can use publicly available statistics from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau, and from research initiatives like Pew Research Center. Make sure you’re only working with well-known organizations, whose data is peer-reviewed and fact checked for accuracy. These general statistics will help you learn more about how your demographics act and where they can be found.
You’ll also need to conduct more qualitative research, and research more relevant to your products and services. For this, the best approach is usually conducting surveys, asking a small selection of participants in your target markets what they like, don’t like, and might change about your offerings.
If you need help figuring our your target demographics or kicking off your marketing and advertising campaign, contact Quez Media today!
