Researching audiences is an essential part of understanding your business’s target market. Why is a target audience important? Your target audience consists of the type of consumers who are most likely to purchase the product or service you are promoting. Identifying your target audience using market research software tools helps you construct a game plan to reach them most effectively. Ultimately, you should focus on finding out who your potential customers are, how to approach them, and what they expect—and that’s why using research tools is crucial.
The leading market insights research platforms enable companies to understand their clients, competitors, examine consumer trends and preferences, and monitor customer satisfaction—including the quality of your products. In order to determine what works best for your target consumer, a quality research program and a target market research tool enable you to assess every element of your customers and who they are. Whether that’s tailoring your products and services or developing marketing plans and customer service guidelines, it’s important to keep your customers’ opinions top of mind.
To keep tabs on your customers, how you reach and understand them, and see what the competition is selling, data-backed insights research tools can help. So what are market research tools you can use to help identify and evaluate your audience?
What Are Some Research Tools You Can Use to Better Understand Your Audience?
There are several kinds of target audience research tools available, but it’s crucial to choose the ones that can assist you in gathering and synthesizing the data you need to make informed business decisions to drive profitability. Data helps you make decisions that will ensure the success of your initiatives by helping you make informed decisions on what’s best for your company. Whether you introduce new items or discontinue existing product lines, expand into new markets or perhaps reallocate resources, investing in market research tools should be a priority.
What are some market research use-cases that you can implement to better understand your audience?
- Customer feedback empowers businesses to improve their customer experience by identifying pain points and upgrading their products and services.
- Website analytics collect and analyze generated data based on website visitors to measure behaviors and gain insights.
- Brand tracking allows researchers to discover emerging trends related to their brand positioning by regularly collecting data, monitoring all brand awareness, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
- Customer and market segmentation gives you the demographics of your target market and what preferences they have about your brand and products.
- Ad effectiveness enables companies to precisely measure the impact of campaigns, evaluate their overall effectiveness, and make the necessary improvements.
Using a solution like the PureSpectrum Insights Platform, you’ll have the ability to conduct these measurements—and more!
What Are Two Areas to Consider When Defining Your Target Audience?
The two areas that are most important to keep in mind when defining your target audience are the different types of target audiences and the analytics and insights you collect through market research.
Analytics and Insights
Knowing about your target audiences can help you better understand their purchasing behavior and anticipate their unique demands in the future. To gain insights on your ideal customer, you should be asking questions like:
- Where are they located? (What is the geographic data?)
- What are their demographics? (What are their gender, age, marital status, and income?)
- Why do they buy? (What drives your audience to purchase your product or service?)
- How do they buy? (What is their purchasing behavior?)
In order to develop useful business insights and effectively report on the results, market research analytics involves collecting information about target markets, your customers, and any marketing initiatives through data visualization tools. When doing market research, analytics and insights consider the whole picture of customer profiles—including any online activity, their purchasing habits, and contact details.
By understanding and analyzing your audience—and who they are—you’ll be better able to provide the product or service they need to meet their needs. With the PureSpectrum Marketplace Platform solution, you can connect with your target audience in 60+ countries.
Types of Target Audience
Your target audience is the demographic of consumers who are most likely to be interested in your goods or services. That means developing an ideal customer profile (ICP) based on the data you’ve collected, while also considering audience segmentation and personas.
- Segmentation refers to the process through which businesses separate their contacts, leads, and customers into distinct subgroups. You will have a far better chance of developing successful marketing tactics if you learn about each segment and its characteristics.
- Personas refers to a fictitious representation of a customer, based on real-world behavior data and your in-depth understanding of your target market. They are also sometimes referred to as a buyer persona.
To narrow it down even further, there are two types of audience segmentation that really determine your target audience and how you interact with them: demographics and psychographics. Factors like age, gender, income, location, and other data points are a part of your target audience’s demographic data. Whereas psychographics are concerned with psychological traits and characteristics, like the values, goals, interests, and lifestyles of consumers.
Using both analytics and target audience segmentation, you’ll be able to pin down who is most likely to buy your product or service. Even customers with less resources, like money, will stick with your product or have an easier time transitioning when you market it correctly. Does this product accurately reflect their need and address their pain points? If so, they’re more likely to remain—or become— a customer. You can determine your target audience using analytics and insights with tools like PureSpectrum’s Insights Platform and start marketing to people who want and need your product.
What Is the Best Marketing Research Tool?
The best market research tools equip your business with valuable insights and solutions that decrease time and expenses. That data can be delivered through the PureSpectrum Insights Platform solution—which helps you generate the data and easily understand it. We provide marketing research that meets the needs of insights professionals, marketing professionals, and product teams. Our integrated Marketplace Platform gives you access to a plethora of integrated panels and is the most cutting-edge fielding dashboard in the industry. We also offer an industry-leading respondent-level scoring system called PureScore™, a detailed, cutting-edge Machine Learning driven scoring system created to evaluate each survey respondent’s quality on a scale from 0 to 10. Market researchers can rely on our market research solutions to deliver high-quality data to their target audience with features like:
- Automated fielding
- Sample management
- Survey tool agnostic
If you’re interested in learning more about how PureSpectrum can help you take charge of your market research, visit our website today and schedule a demo.
About PureSpectrum
PureSpectrum offers a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform, helping insights professionals make decisions more efficiently, and faster than ever before. Awarded MR Supplier of the Year at the 2021 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, PureSpectrum is recognized for industry-leading data quality. PureSpectrum developed the respondent-level scoring system, PureScore™, and believes their continued success stems from their talent density and dedication to simplicity and quality.
In the few years since its inception, PureSpectrum has been named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s Fast 500 since 2020, and ranked for three years in a row on the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative List and the Inc. 5000 lists.