If you’re studying an online masters in business analytics or another related degree in the field, you’ll know better than anyone how instrumental the insights provided by analytics are in enabling businesses to fully understand their target audiences.
In business marketing, in particular, understanding your target audience is critical to formulating the most effective marketing campaigns. Why? If you’re not targeting your campaign messages to a relevant, receptive, and responsive audience, you’ll miss the mark every time.
Here’s how analytics can prove invaluable in understanding your target audience, and effectively gearing your marketing campaigns towards them.
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What Makes a Target Audience?
What does it mean to have a target audience? If you want to identify who your target audience is, you need to pinpoint your niche customer market. In other words, you’ll need to narrow down your business’s focus. What types of people should your sales efforts be directed to? Who do you want to reach with your marketing messages? Who is your ideal customer?
For businesses to be relevant to their audiences, they need to get specific about who their target customer’s buyer persona is. Some questions to ask when identifying buyer persona: What type of person is your business’s product offering most suited to? Who would want to buy your product? And most importantly, what is their customer profile? That is to say, what are their personal identifiers, geographic location, or socio-economic status? Once you’ve identified these elements of your target customer’s buyer persona, ask yourself – what marketing messages resonate with these kinds of people? How do you relate to them, capture their attention, and speak to them on their wavelength?
The truth about really getting to know who makes up your target audience, though? It’s more challenging than simply figuring out generalized demographic identifiers like age, gender, or location. Understanding your target audience is a matter of gaining deep insights into what makes them tick, what their core values are, and essentially, what lingers in the very depths of their psyche. But as a business marketer, how do you gain these valuable insights into your target audience, and use them to inform, shape, and manage the direction of your marketing campaigns? The answers lie in analytics.
How Does Analytics Help Us Understand Target Audiences?
To get the best results and obtain the most valuable customer insights from data analytics, we first need to understand the different types of data that exist. For the sake of simplicity, data analysis can be divided into two different branches, which can help us uncover either:
Quantitative Data Insights
- This relates to the hard facts – numbers, statistics, black and white data.
or
Qualitative Data Insights
- This type of data is more nuanced and relates to customer sentiment, preferences, attitudes, and behaviors.
The benefits of employing both quantitative and qualitative data analytics? Stay with us.
Analytics Helps Businesses Better Understand Customer Behavior and Buying Habits
As a business owner, analyzing the data you gather about your customers helps you gain valuable insights into their behaviors as consumers. When do customers buy specific products, for example? Are they more inclined to make purchases at certain times of year? Or perhaps, do certain marketing campaigns elicit certain buyer behaviors?
Using analytics also allows you to map out your target audience’s customer journey across all touchpoints of your business. In this way, you can cultivate your client communication strategies, and learn how to create marketing messages that influence their buyer behavior.
Analytics Helps Businesses Measure Return on Investment (ROI)
Understanding the customer journey is only one part of business marketing, albeit a crucial one.
Analyzing customer data also enables businesses to measure their return on investment – particularly in terms of where they’re placing their ad spend. This helps businesses become better informed about the success of their marketing and advertising campaigns, and whether they’ve been effective in reaching their target audiences.
Analytics Assists with Future Business Projections
Finally, data analytics can also assist with preempting how target audiences will react to future campaigns.
How does it do this? By measuring customer responses and reactions to past campaigns, analytics can help us predict the future. Known as predictive analytics, this process is integral to premeditating how target audiences may behave in the future, and how upcoming marketing campaigns can influence customer behavior moving forward.