Why getting the audience right matters
Describing your target audience is one of the most important steps in promoting a business online. Get it wrong and your marketing investment may never pay back.
A simple example. Your real buyers are women, but when you built the portrait you assumed they were men. So you write the strategy for men, plan content for men, design banners that appeal to men and run ads to a male audience. After spending the test budget you see no new customers and conclude that online advertising does not work for your business.
That is the trap: one wrong assumption about the audience and you write off a channel that could have been profitable.
Core principles of audience definition
Understanding your audience lets you focus on a specific group of customers and offer them the solution they need right now. The key idea: your target audience is the people who need your product at this moment.
A basic audience portrait can be built in 5 to 10 minutes, and that is enough for 95% of situations. At the start, do not dive deep into research. A grasp of the basic characteristics is sufficient. Broad categories such as children's clothing, sports, cars or fashion are a good starting split.
Segmentation criteria
You can slice an audience by many criteria. Pick the ones that matter for your business:
- Family status, if it is relevant to your portrait.
- Income level, if you want to split segments by purchasing power.
- Membership in relevant communities and interest groups.
- Worldview, from religious to atheist.
- Education: secondary, higher and so on.
- Job title, from analyst to lawyer.
- Device: run separate campaigns for smartphone, desktop and tablet users, and go deeper into specific models if that matters.
- Operating system and browser, for example Windows 10 or Chrome.
These splits are exactly what you need to test a business idea or launch a campaign.
How many criteria are enough
A workable audience description should cover at least 10 of these points. That is the minimum. It becomes the base you build on later to expand the audience and work it in depth.
Once the portrait is written, estimate the size of the audience, at least roughly, from open sources.
Sizing the audience
Audience size tells you how profitable a campaign can be and lets you calculate the return on your ad spend.
If your audience is, say, wholesalers in one city who work directly with large retail chains, it is extremely narrow. Investing heavily in broad channels such as social media may simply not pay off. The opposite is also true: if the audience runs into hundreds, thousands or millions of users, your business should be in social media, in paid search, working with creators and using the widest possible marketing toolkit.
Audience size drives your choice of traffic channel and the strategy for delivering your value proposition.
Testing hypotheses by segment
Use the criteria above to describe your audience as you see it, then start testing your hypotheses group by group.
A portrait exercise usually produces several different portraits. Each is coherent on its own and each must be tested separately. The test results show which segment delivers the best return and which underperforms.
Case in practice: a children's clothing store
One case from our portfolio shows how much careful audience work can deliver. We promoted an online store selling children's clothing and split the audience into 8 subsegments before launch: 3 by country and 5 by children's age groups in 2-year steps.
The interesting part: only 2 segments performed and delivered a 700% ROI, while 6 segments did not perform at all. With fewer audiences defined, we might well have missed those results entirely.
Recommendation on segmentation
Split your audience into as many subsegments as you reasonably can, test each one separately and compare them by ROI and overall payback.
Takeaway
A correct audience definition and a granular split into subsegments help you avoid wasted marketing investment. Test every segment on its own and compare the results by payback.
