There are countless things to consider when running a business. It can sometimes be overwhelming, as seemingly unimportant elements can become make-or-break actions for an enterprise. When you drill down to what’s most essential to an organization, identity stands out as a critical variable. Without a sense of why it’s there and what it’s doing, a corporation is just a body of people throwing resources around hoping to turn a profit. Understanding target markets is a crucial element of any organization’s sense of self.
These are some ideas for finding your target market with search analytics.
What Is a Target Market and Why Does It Matter?
The term target market is fairly self-explanatory in its most basic sense. At its core, a target market is a group of people an organization wants to attract with its products or services. Some people might read this and wonder why you would want to limit your business to only a certain kind of customer. While this might be the case for massive corporations such as Facebook, Google, or AT&T — all of which attract users from just about every demographic due to the universality — it’s not so true for the vast majority of businesses. Typically, companies need to develop a niche, which can then be used to target products to a specific group of people.
Let’s look at an example.
Say you run a women’s clothing store. Your main audience is likely going to be people who are actually going to wear the clothes, which isn’t the general public. In order to market these clothes, you’ll want to understand the members of that target market as fully as possible. This doesn’t just mean learning their demographics, but what actually inspires them to make purchase decisions.
Another thing that’s important to note about target markets is there can be many types of people who are interested in a product for different reasons. Looking back at the women’s clothing store example, men associated with women who wear those clothes could potentially be an equally important target market. These guys will likely want to get something nice for their mates during the holidays. It’s the job of the clothing store to identify this opportunity, and find ways to communicate more directly to those consumers. An organization’s ability to identify and address its target markets will directly correlate to its success.
How Is Search Analytics Unique?
In the past, determining a target market was more of a thought experiment than a scientific one. But data is changing the way organizations are able to approach seemingly qualitative problems. Thanks to innovations such as search analytics, companies can now use evidence to identify their target markets and ideal customer profiles.
Search analytics is a unique way to use data because it allows for greater granularity without extra time and effort. Analytics platform providers such as ThoughtSpot incorporate search analytics into their services to make insights more accessible. It works much like a Google search, but for your data. Through natural language processing powered by artificial intelligence, these search analytics provide actionable insights based on strings of text.
This puts a lot of power in the hands of users.
What Ways Can Search Analytics Help Find Your Target Market?
There are four main ways of looking at target markets: geography, demographics, behavior, and psychology. Each of these plays a role in deciding whether a potential customer will fit into your target market. Drilling down into each of these in new ways will provide a more complete view of your target market, which should improve your organization’s ability to attract customers.
One of the biggest ways search analytics can help with finding a target market is by putting the power of analytics in the hands of more people. The members of a marketing team probably aren’t going to be experts in data manipulation. But that’s not important when search analytics can place serious power right at their fingertips. Even laypeople can quickly get actionable insights in as little time as it takes to type a query.
Further, search analytics provides a doorway to finding new, deeper, and more revealing data points that can help organizations better understand their target markets. Sometimes, the most important information is completely hidden from view. Collecting data and looking at it through as many lenses as possible, marketing teams can get a better idea of the most important factors in a target market.
You can’t overstate the importance of understanding your customers when running a business. Using search analytics to better define target markets can be a game-changer.