Finding and describing your target audience
A good target audience definition brings
together brand positioning, creative work,
content development and agencies work
Drawing one continuous line from positioning and differentiation, through the audience description, to creative, content and advertising is demanding work.
It ends in a single system for the brand's communication: from the choice of themes and meanings to the criteria for judging creative ideas.
Every contact with the audience now carries weight
Content, bloggers, special projects and communities all demand clarity: who the communication is for, which problem it has to touch, and which meanings will read as relevant.
When it is ever harder to offset a vague understanding of the audience with sheer volume of placements, what gives you an edge is precision about what the target customer is asking for.
The knowledge of whom to speak to, about what, in which language and through which channels at each stage of the brand health pyramid is set down in a document the whole marketing team can use.
What an audience description is built from
A surface-level customer portrait is little help in making a brand's communication engaging
Age, gender, income and a list of interests can be useful for setting up targeting, but they rarely explain a person's behaviour or their choice. They do not help identify the themes, arguments and emotional accents that make communication engaging.
For that reason the quality of an audience description lies in having a psychographic, values-based portrait of the groups you are about to address.
Depth of understanding and the ability to apply it day to day are the marks of a good audience description
Detail and quality matter. So does something else: how workable the description is in the brand's everyday communication.
Is it clear which pains and barriers the creative should be built on, which emotions the communication has to carry, which arguments to use at each stage of the brand's development, and by which criteria to judge the agencies' ideas.
A good audience description answers these questions and becomes a shared frame of reference for your team.
Segmentation lets you see the structure of an audience without averaging it into one portrait
By segmenting both the audience that has not yet encountered the brand and the one already engaging with it, we identify the segments where work will do most for growth. We see the motives that group people into segments. Within them we understand the barriers that hold growth back. And attitudes towards competitors across segments show which of them are strategically important for the brand.
Product scenarios are sometimes not enough to explain why a brand is chosen
When several products solve the same problem, the choice is not settled by functional value alone. Segmentation then has to bring into play attitudes to the category, personal values, social context, past experience and experience in adjacent categories.
Every target segment requires understanding its internal logic and the brand's role in solving the problem
A workable segmentation tells us not only “who these people are” but also the beliefs that shape their choice, the logic of their decisions and the trade-offs available to them. In the end we see what role the brand can occupy in their frame of reference and, above all, how that role should be played.
The choice of method depends on the brand's objectives and the conditions of the business
We match the research design to the specific task: together with you we weigh up whether qualitative methods will do, whether quantitative segmentation is needed, whether to bring in additional data sources or analysis of user-generated content. Our principle is sufficiency over excess, and a transparent discussion of the advantages and limits of every option.
Your voice, your intuition, your criticism and your questions are the most valuable element of our work with you
In the end our analysis is first of all your instrument, and it matters to us that it is comfortable in your hands.
The finished audience description becomes a working platform for the marketing team
It helps you formulate communication strategy, build content platforms, choose channels, judge creative ideas and design the ways you engage with people.
The result is a system of conditions and rules by which the brand builds its relationships with people
It is a single understanding of who needs the brand, why they choose it, and how to build lasting engagement with the audience through communication and presence both online and off.