January 11, 2015
As with any marketing activity, campaign, or strategy, having a strong sense of your target audience is critical to the success of money spent. Advertising and marketing is not cheap, therefore directly messaging your target demographics can be the most effective use of a company’s budget, and generate the greatest Return on Investment (ROI).
Existing brands can look at a slew of data points to help determine who their target consumer is, and therefore take that information to better market and segment their advertising and messaging to the most likely consumer.
The analysis presented in “Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials” shares data of the newest consumer generation, Millennials, and provides both insight of their own engagement trends, but also compares and contrasts to previous generations’ current behavior. This is great information for a brand that is trying to have a broader insight into the generation as a whole, but what if your primary consumer isn’t Millennial?
Brands should look at various information sources easily available to them, such as purchase data, which can show geo-location of consumers. This can then be overlaid with other marketing and DMA data to then create “look-a-likes” (a feature Facebook makes available for advertising) to then find new or emerging markets similar to your consumer. Additional purchase data can show fans of Widget A might also be organically purchasing Gadget B. By cross-selling to fans of each item, a brand can increase not only consumer awareness of their product/service portfolio, but also increase conversion rates and average order value, all through simple data mining.
SocialTimes.com has a great article on Know Your Audience: 7 Ways To Learn More About Your Community which includes information on how to understand broad demographic data, but also how to review your own fans’ information to determine trends and patterns.
Additionally, brands can use simple online surveys, either to their fans/consumers from email lists, social channels, or even proactive presentations on a website presence. These simple surveys can provide both qualitative and quantitative data on consumer intentions, interest, behavior and more. Ontradata.com provides basic details on why brands should survey for both positive and negative information, as well as how to construct an effective survey instrument.
Audience knowledge is key to a brand’s success. It is core to understand how your primary consumer thinks, how to effectively use your budget to activate them, and how to identify strong KPIs in a company’s online channels to monitor and measure their overall performance.
Questions:
How would you go about identifying an existing brand’s primary audience, i.e. tools, data points, KPIs, etc?
If you were launching a new product line, or looking to launch a new business to market, how would you identify your key audience and what tactics would you recommend based on the analysis?
Audience, Audience Development, Consumer Behavior, Data Analysis, Data Mining, Generations,