How to Identify a Target Group for Your Campaigns

Tailoring your marketing campaign to a target group may seem logical and relatively straight-forward, but in reality, it’s where most campaigns fail.

A study carried out by Nielsen in 2016 found that almost half of UK campaigns fail to reach their target audience. This is a key issue and one that’s fueling the need for insight and marketing to fuse together and work hand-in-hand.

What is a target group?

Marketing that’s aimed at the right target group focuses on the people that will buy from them, and the problems it can help them solve. Having this kind of focus means not losing sight of your goals or wasting time and budget on those who don’t have the need you’re looking to fill. Here’s how to improve your focus in the simplest way.

What are your campaign objectives?

Start by clarifying what your campaign wants to achieve.

• Are you trying to expand into new markets?
• Are you looking to exploit areas that are yet untapped by competitors?
• Are you trying to upsell or cross-sell to customers, capitalizing on your existing customer base?
• Do you want to engender greater loyalty among customers, ensuring they don’t veer to competitors, and creating more ambassadors for your company?
• Are you simply aiming to grow the number of customers within your remit, raising your profile?

Be clear about the business goals driving your campaign. Only then will you know how to measure its success.

Why do people need you in their lives?

Once a brand is clear about its objectives, it needs to define its target market, which means knowing the customer.

Start by finding out which problems your content, product or service will help to solve.

Will it save time for busy moms, for example, or will it enable young professionals to be more productive? Why are you best placed to address this consumer pain-point?

Once you’ve clarified this, take a closer look at the people seeking a solution to that particular problem – does it span gender, age, location and profession, for example?

Get to know your target market better.

Segmenting a target market based on certain characteristics is relevant for both consumer and business brands.

A consumer brand might target customers on a psychographic basis, for example, appealing to those who aspire to having a greater social status, and who will therefore be attracted to products or services that align with this.

A business, on the other hand, might target companies geographically because it has good industry knowledge, either nationally or within a specific region, and can leverage this on their behalf.

The way in which you segment your customers will depend on your brand, your offering, your business and campaign objectives.

Make yourself seen and heard.

Ensuring your campaign is highly relevant to the segments you’ve identified is also dependent on knowing what these consumers want to see. This goes back to finding out what makes them tick; to understanding their attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

What prompts them to make a purchase and why do they make it?

Find out what matters to your audience.

This level of knowledge will enable you to tailor your messaging to ensure it resonates. If you know your consumers are highly influenced by product quality, for example, rather than price, this must be clear in your wording and imagery.

Why focus on the product’s reduced cost or the brand’s ethical credentials if quality is uppermost in their minds?

Know where they like to spend their time.

Be clear on where your consumers want to see your campaign. Information regarding which devices they prefer to use and how they consume their media is invaluable.

Our latest research into entertainment habits, for example, reveals that video is playing an increasing role in social media activities. 1 in 2 Facebookers, almost 4 in 10 Instagrammers and Snapchatters, as well as 3 in 10 Twitter users report to have watched videos on these platforms in the past month.

With 40% of 16-24s now saying social media is a key research channel for them, this makes it an important format for brands to tap into.

As a brand appealing to younger markets, why spend a fortune on an ad for linear TV if you would be more likely to reach your target audience in this way?

Use hard data to drive a campaign that delivers.

The customer journey continues to grow more complex with the deployment of multiple devices and a seemingly infinite number of sites from which to access media.

This means understanding who and where your target group is, how they behave and why is an integral part of running a successful campaign. But your learning shouldn’t stop there – Consumers are continuously changing and advances in technology necessitate an ongoing evolution in behaviors.

Keep accessing the latest data, continually refining and fine-tuning your targets to ensure you consistently hit that sweet spot and create campaigns that deliver the right results.