Finding your real target market

Before you can even consider starting a business, you have to think about who will use your product or service. The group that you aim to reach is also known as your “target market.” Your target market defines your tone of voice, your sales pitch, the language you use, and what your marketing strategy will look like. 

Sounds easy, right? It isn’t! You have to narrow down your target audience to maximize your return on investment, especially in the digital marketing world. You want to invest your money in advertising for a group of people that will give you the most conversions. But how do you find that group of people?

Categorizing your potential customers

First and foremost, you need to categorize your potential customers. How you categorize this depends on your business, but there are some essentials that you can almost always use to start categorizing.

• Demographics. You can already narrow down your target market by simply looking at the age and gender of your customers. If you are narrowing down companies, this can also include company size and their industry.
• Geography. The countries you want to target.

You can also include other segmentation practices to further define your target market. A commonly used practice is categorizing people with certain interests within your online advertising to test which group works best. Once your categories are narrowed down, it is time to start analyzing.

Analyzing the defined categories

The first step to analyzing your categories is to track relevant data. For this, we use Google Analytics. Some segments can already be tracked just by installing Google Analytics, but for some segmentation practices, you need to take some extra steps. You can implement different campaigns with different targeting in Google Ads, or you can use different ad groups with different targeting in social media advertising and set up URL parameters to test the different options.

The next step is to gather and analyze the data in Google Analytics. Compare the different categories you created by comparing different sets of data. Here is an example of how you can find out which country is best for your target audience and how two groups with different interests can be compared after setting up the right URL parameters within Facebook Ads.

In the picture below, you see a hypothetical case study in which the Caribbean is targeted. Jamaica has the most users, followed by Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Curaçao, and then the Netherlands. The first three countries have more users, but they engage less with the website. The higher-quality leads come from Curaçao and the Netherlands.

Let’s say that the product is web development. We could say that business owners are usually the ones who need to develop a new website. However, another group of people we might want to target is people who are interested in web development. We use A/B testing with URL parameters to track the difference between these two groups.
The first group we track is business owners. The results we get are as follows:

The second group we track is people who are interested in web development. These are the results:

These results make it clear that business owners are a bigger target group that is also more likely to engage.

Choosing your target market

After gathering all the information, it is time to choose our target market. Instead of assuming which groups will work best, we now have data to ensure we are making an educated choice. We have tested several possibilities, and now we know who our target market is. In the case study, we decide to only show the ads for Curaçao and the Netherlands. The interests will be defined as “business owners.” After all, they are the group most likely to convert, which makes them the target market.