Target Group Analysis: Understanding Your Ideal Customers

Successful marketing hinges on knowing who you're trying to reach. When you know more about the people most likely to buy from you, you can tailor your offering, messaging, and customer journey to fit their needs. To find these special nuances and know what makes your customers unique, we recommend doing a target group analysis.

As marketers, we often find ourselves juggling multiple campaigns, brands, and messages. Each one intends to target the most relevant customers, and customer groups can vary between brands and campaigns.

When you start with a target group analysis, you can identify exactly who you need to speak to, making it easy to craft a message that resonates.

Here's a closer look at the purpose of a target analysis group and how to do it right.

Contents:

What Is Target Group Analysis?

We define target group analysis as the process of finding what makes your audience unique, the characteristics they share, and what matters to them.

You might also hear target group analysis called audience segmentation.

As marketers, our goal is to connect with our audience in a way that drives action - whether that's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or simply engaging with our content.

To make that connection, we need to understand our audience on a deeper level. This is where target group analysis comes into play.

It's all about diving deep into the specifics of who your target audience is - their demographics, behaviors, preferences, pain points, and more.

By conducting a thorough analysis, you can tailor your marketing efforts to meet their needs - and ultimately, achieve better results.

Benefits of Target Group Analysis

You wouldn't try to sell winter coats to customers in tropical climates, right? No matter how great your product is, your marketing messages just aren't going to land.

That's why target group analysis matters. It gives you the opportunity to uncover what segments of your audience truly need and want.

This means:

• Creating relevant content your audience will care about
• Optimizing your marketing spend by focusing on channels your audience segment uses
• Improving the experience with marketing personalization

When customers feel heard and understood, they're more likely to act and stay loyal to your brand.

This can lead to several tangible, measurable benefits, including:

• Increased conversion rates
• Greater customer retention
• Better product development
• Strategic decisions
• A stronger and more obvious competitive advantage
• Higher ROI

Whether you're aiming to boost sales, generate leads, or increase engagement, a well-executed target group analysis will help you create campaigns that are more likely to convert.

TIP: Check out our blog on the benefits of data-driven marketing campaigns!

How to Conduct a Target Group Analysis

Target group analysis in digital marketing is more than just a one-time exercise. Your customers' preferences shift, and so do demographics. That's why it's important to master the art of identifying consumer behavior and knowing how to adjust your marketing accordingly.

Let's review the steps involved in finding your target analysis group.

1. Collect the right data

Data should inform every marketing communication strategy. You can use data sources to help you learn more about your customers and the best ways to reach them.

Here are some places you can look:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can reveal a lot about the people who are already browsing your website. You can check these analytics to discover how customers are finding you, what they're looking at, and how long they're spending on your site, for example.

Analytics can also help you map the customer journey. Know the steps your customers take from discovery to conversion and everything in between.

With this intel, you can pair your campaigns to specific channels to build on your previous wins.

Meta Business Suite Insights

If you're using Facebook or Instagram to promote your business, tap into your built-in analytics to learn more about your audience. You can uncover demographic information, behaviors, and more in the Meta Business Suite.

Go to the Meta Business Suite, then click Insights on the left-side menu.

You'll see a breakdown of your audience's ages and gender mix, as well as top cities and your best-performing content.

Consumer intelligence tools

Tools like Meltwater's Consumer Intelligence solution can help you get inside the minds of your customers. Review data surrounding behaviors, channels, attitudes, and more, then adapt your marketing strategy to fit each audience segment.

Our data is built on a live social feed, giving you a real-time view of your customers. What's more, the platform also gives you the best next steps so you can take action on your findings.

2. Segment your audience

With the data above, you can start finding connections between customers. There are lots of ways you can group customers together. For example, you might have a large following in a particular city or region. Or, a large portion of your customers might be women.

These connections are easy to find, but they're not always the most effective way to segment your audience.

Instead, you can dig deeper into the hidden connections between customers. For example, how did they discover your brand? What have they bought from you? What are they interested in beyond your brand?

You might even combine several of these connections to find a small but highly specific group of customers for your marketing campaign.

The goal of segmentation is to find a group of customers who share a similar need that you can fill - and then tailor your marketing to show how you can fill it in a way they'll notice and respond to.

3. Analyze and apply

Once you have your audience segments, you can decide how to reach them with your marketing. Consider the channels, content types, and calls to action that will encourage them to act.

This is a simplified example of a target group analysis model. These steps involve a lot of legwork, but this framework can help you stay the course and get the results you expect.

Using Target Group Analysis Results

Now that you have a target group analysis, you'll need to know what to do with the results.

Let's use an easy target group analysis example. Imagine you're a marketer about to launch a new snack food item. To get a lot of buzz before and on the day of the launch, you use a target group analysis.

Here's how it might look:

1. You identify three key audience segments who would be the most interested in your snack food: eco-conscious Millennials and Gen Zers, health-conscious parents, and foodie enthusiasts.

2. You develop buyer personas to represent each audience segment:

• Eco-Conscious Emily: A 28-year-old graphic designer who actively supports healthy eating. She shops at local organic stores and is highly influenced by sustainability certifications and brand transparency.
• Healthy Hannah: A 34-year-old mother of two who works part-time and is very health-conscious. She reads labels carefully and prefers foods with ingredients that are safe for her children and the environment.
• Foodie Freddie: A 22-year-old college student who loves experimenting with new food products. He's somewhat of an influencer and is drawn to brands that have attractive packaging and content.

In this phase, you'll also need to consider where these personas spend their time. In many cases, you'll need to use an omnichannel marketing approach to effectively reach your audience.

3. You create a tailored marketing strategy for each persona, speaking directly to their needs.

• For Emily, focus on messaging around sustainability, ethical sourcing, and quality ingredients. Highlight the food's sources and use content like blog posts, social media campaigns, and influencer partnerships that resonate with their values.
• For Hannah, emphasize the product's natural ingredients and suitability for the whole family. Consider using testimonials from other parents, educational content about the benefits of dye-free foods, and partnerships with parenting bloggers.
• For Freddie, leverage social media influencers to create buzz around the product's effectiveness and trendy attributes. Use visually appealing content like photos, videos, and limited-time sample offers to drive excitement.

4. After the product launch, monitor how your campaigns perform in each segment. Use analytics to track metrics like engagement, conversion rates, and customer feedback.

If you find that one segment is responding better than others, you can adjust your strategy to focus more on that group or refine your approach to the less responsive segments.

More Tools and Techniques for Target Group Analysis

In addition to using the data sources already mentioned, you can create a more comprehensive target group analysis with these tools and techniques.

Customer surveys and interviews

Customer surveys and interviews give you direct insights from your audience. Their responses can help you understand their preferences, behaviors, and pain points.

Interviews add an extra layer of insight by allowing two-way feedback. This gives you an opportunity to ask follow-up questions or gain clarity around their responses. You also have the benefit of seeing the person you're talking to, including their body language.

To create an effective survey or interview, you'll need to do the following:

• Define an objective for the survey or interview (e.g., discover pain points with existing products, find the factors that influence buying decisions).
• Design the survey using a mix of question types (e.g., open-ended, multiple choice, scale ratings) to get the answers you want.
• Distribute the survey to your segments (e.g., email, social media).

Social media listening tools

Social listening tools monitor conversations across multiple social media platforms, giving you a more complete view of customers and prospects.

That's because social media is a place where guards come down and people say how they feel. You can get a clearer understanding of their real feelings and thoughts, which may prove valuable in finding connections between your various customers.

TIP: Our free eBook The Definitive Guide to Social Listening provides everything you need to know about social listening technology. Check it out!

Maximizing the Value of Target Group Analysis with Meltwater

Meltwater helps you create a target group analysis template with done-for-you consumer intelligence. Our platform gives you the inside scoop on what your audience is talking about across the web. We help you find the hidden patterns between customers so you can identify essential segments you didn't realize existed.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below!

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