How To Research Your Target Market (1 Simple Hack)

What Is a Target Market?

  • A target market refers to a group of potential customers that your customer wants to sell products and services to
  • The best way to approach your target market research is to identify audiences who share similar characteristics including buying geography, buying power, demographics, and incomes.
  • Identifying the target market is an essential step for any company or business owners in the development of a marketing plan.
  • You want to identify the target market that is relevant to your business so that you can customize your copy and offer to speak only to that segment.

Understanding Target Markets

  • Part of the success of selling a good or service is knowing to whom it will appeal and who will ultimately buy it.
  • That’s why businesses spend a lot of time and money to define and monitor its target market.
  • That’s because not all products and services are meant for every consumer.
  • Target markets are generally categorized by age, location, income, and lifestyle.
  • Defining a specific target market allows a company to home in on specific market factors to reach and connect with customers through sales and marketing efforts.

You hear a lot about niching down and understanding your target audience but you’re probably wondering…

How To Research Your Target Audience?

There’s a free tool available called Facebook Audience insights.

and it’s available on the Facebook advertising platform.

You don’t need to be advertising on Facebook in order to use this tool or benefit from the information it provides you. 

You can access audience insights directly by going to www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights/.

Let’s say you provide online wellness programs and courses.

  • Once you logged into Facebook Audience insights
  • Under heading “Location” enter in your target location on the left panel.  
  • Scroll down to the heading “Interest” then type in a topic or keyword that your target audience might be searching for or interested in. 
  • In this example, we’re going to type “yoga”.

Over the right side, this is where you’re going to uncover a lot of information about your ideal customer.

Target Market Demographics

  • Under “Demographics”, you can see here that 74% of people who are interested in yoga are women and the audience is around the 25 to 54 age range. 
  • If you look under “Relationship Status” 55% of this audience are married compared with 27% are single.
  • Under “Education Level”, you can see that they are college educated or university educated. 
  • And if you scroll down to the “Job Title”, double click on the “Selected audience” to sort the % of occupation from highest to lowest
  • You can see that in the United States that are interested in yoga that work in administration services as well as sales which has 24%.

Scroll up and click “Page likes” on the top bar…

Target Market Page Likes

  • Now, what’s interesting here is you’ve got the “Top Categories” or other pages and interests that your target audience likes.
  • Under page likes, you’ve got specific pages of how likely your audience is to like any of these given pages.
  • The higher the affinity the more likely your target audience will be interested in these Facebook pages as well.

Once again, scroll up and then click on “Location”.

Target Market Top Location

In top cities, click on the selected audience to sort from highest to lowest % of of audience.

You can see here that the top three cities are: New York, Los Angeles and Cook County.

This is going to help you narrow in your ideal customer when you’re geo targeting.

Finally, under “Activity”…

Target Market Activities

  • You’ll notice that there are a lot of click on ads compared to all the other engagement activities.
  • So you’ll see that people who are interested on yoga are on mobile and out of that percentage are on android. 

Target Market Age

If you head over on the left panel, you can even be more specific and narrow this down to the age and gender of your target market.

In this case, let’s narrow it down to women only because they are the bulk of the audience aging 25 to 54 years old.

  • This would change the data that you’ll find under Demographics, Page Likes, Location as well as Activity.

Keywords For Target Market

Now you can go back and repeat this process with keywords that your target audience might be typing into Google such as:

  • Magazine names that the target audience read. 
  • Blog or websites that they visit.
  • Experts or influencer names that they follow.
  • Brand name or products and services that your target audience is already buying o
  • r the categories that you found under Page likes.

This works even better if you have a buyer’s email list…

Bonus Tips: If You Have a Buyers List

  • Upload your email database into “Facebook Audiences” as a CSV file.
  • You will need at least 1,000 emails for Facebook to create an audience. 
  • Then head back into Facebook Audience Insight and repeat the same process that you just seen in this video and uncover more information about your buyers.

That’s it guys!  Make sure you grab your free sales funnel planning workbook below.

This workbook guides you through the 5 simple steps of creating simple yet seriously effective sales funnels that convert leads into sales!

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Aimee Vo

Aimee Vo is a digital marketing expert with over 12 years hands-on experience in SEO and paid traffic. She publishes content on sales funnels, lead generation, and content marketing with insights from personal experience.