Target Group

The Target Group (or target audience) in a marketing campaign is a group of potential customers
with the same intentions, identified through a segmentation process for the purpose of lead generation.

What is a Target Group?

A Target Group (or target audience) is a selected group of people to which a marketing campaign is directed. The target audience is defined on the basis of various criteria, such as age, gender, interests, income level, place of residence, etc.

Defining the Target Group is an important part of Lead Generation, as it allows focusing attention on the most promising audiences and reduces costs.

How to create a Target Group in 4 steps?

A target audience is a group of people who meet specific segmentation criteria. This can include existing and potential ones. Defining the target audience reduces advertising costs and increases the effectiveness of the message. This can be done in 4 steps:

Identify the objective of the marketing campaign, e.g. to increase sales of a particular product or service.
Select segmentation criteria that affect the sales of the chosen product or service.
Create at least three customer groups or customer personae based on the criteria you have adopted.
Select the target audience, i.e. the one most likely to purchase the product or service.

The precise definition of the Target Group should also take into account the users’ intentions (purchasing, commercial, educational, navigational) and geographical, demographic, and behavioral criteria. This can be achieved by building customer personae – short summaries of customer characteristics that help to visualize the people to whom the marketing message is directed.

SEO SEM target audience

Successful Lead Generation, both for SEM and SEO, requires accurate identification of the Target Group that is most interested in the products or services on offer. Therefore, building a customer persona, i.e. a summary of their characteristics, is good practice. This allows the audience of the marketing message to be visualized and makes it easier to understand their intentions (e.g. purchasing, sales, education, navigation). Geographical (e.g. country, city size, place of residence) and behavioral (e.g. search phrases, devices used) criteria are also important. This allows you to narrow down your customer segments and focus on the people who are most likely to make a purchase or engage with you. CRM-related criteria can also be included, such as company size, company product usage status, date of the product acquisition, or company products owned.

Step-by-Step Targeting

Accurate targeting is a process in which the characteristics of the people to whom marketing communications or advertising will be directed are precisely defined. The aim of this process is to narrow down the audience to a specific group of people who are most interested in the products or services offered by the company and are most likely to make a purchase or engage in a partnership.

In order to accurately identify the target audience, various criteria need to be analyzed, such as:

Demographic: age, gender, education level, earnings, family situation, etc.
Geographical: country, city size, place of residence, etc.
Behavioural: interests, preferences, leisure activities, internet search terms, etc.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) related criteria: the size of the company, status of use of the company’s product, date of purchase of the product, company products owned, etc.

Accurately defining the Target Group allows you to focus on the audiences who are most interested in the products or services you are offering, which increases the effectiveness of Lead Generation and reduces the costs associated with reaching the wrong audiences.

How do you analyze your Target Group?

In order to effectively optimize the Target Group, it is necessary to analyze the data during the marketing campaign. Basic indicators such as the number of conversions (i.e. the number of people who perform a specific action, e.g. place an order or fill in a form) and the CTR (click-through rate, i.e. the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of ad impressions) allow you to assess whether your target audience is properly defined. If there are a lot of impressions, but low engagement and a high bounce rate (i.e. a high percentage of people who leave the site after visiting a single subpage), this is a signal that the Target Group or the marketing message (or both) are inadequate.

Data analysis allows you to modify your marketing strategy on an ongoing basis and adapt it to the needs and expectations of your Target Audience. It can also help to identify gaps in audience reach and optimize campaigns to make them more effective. It is worth remembering that the target audience can evolve over time, so it is important to continuously monitor the data and respond to changes.

Target groups in Performance Marketing

Target Groups are a tool that allows you to precisely define the audience of a marketing communication or advertisement. They are commonly used in marketing automation and performance marketing, and their use allows you to focus on the people who are most interested in the products or services you offer. Most often, target audience is created using data from Google Analytics, which allows the building of customer persona based on the behavior on the company’s website. This data is then imported into the Google Ads account, allowing the ad content to be fine-tuned for specific audiences. In this way, it is possible to reach the target audience more effectively and increase the chances of generating leads.

Target Group Remarketing

Remarketing is a way of reaching people who have already visited our website but have not made a purchase or filled in a newsletter sign-up form. It is an effective method of Lead Generation as it allows us to focus on people who have already taken an interest in our offer and may be more likely to make a purchase decision. However, it is important to accurately define the target audience for remarketing so that you target the people who are most interested in the products or services you are offering. This can be done by analyzing data related to user behavior on the site and identifying demographic, geographical, and behavioral criteria.

Example of target audience

Criteria can be created by defining the target audience scope and adding the missing information. Here is an example of optimizing criteria:

Customer intention: commercial (willingness to purchase a product or service)
Position in the funnel: top or middle (those more likely to buy or interested in an offer)
Geographic criteria: US country, permanent resident (people living in the US and permanently residing there)
Demographic criteria: age 25-54 (people of working age)
Gender: male (products or services aimed at men)
Income: above average (higher income earners who can afford to spend more)
Interests: consumer electronics, audio equipment (people interested in these areas)

You could also consider adding other criteria, such as education level, lifestyle, type of residence (e.g. flat or house), etc., depending on the nature of the product or service the company offers. It is important that the criteria are chosen as accurately as possible in order to target the audience that is most interested in the offer and most likely to buy.

Target Group Analysis Example

This following optimization allowed for better targeting of the ads and increased effectiveness. Example of Target Group analysis:

Ads campaign report shows that men aged 35-54 generate the most conversions (i.e. purchases or completed forms, for example).
Ads campaigns are less effective for women. In order to increase the effectiveness of the campaigns, the company has decided to exclude women from the target audience and increase the rate by 20% for men aged 35-54.
For women, new ad groups with adapted content will be created.
Men who are under 35 or older than 55 were excluded from the Target Group.

Target Audience for Lead Generation

A target audience is a group of potential clients who meet certain segmentation criteria. Defining the target audience is an important element in generating leads, as it reduces advertising costs and increases the effectiveness of the message. This can be done by defining the objective of the marketing campaign, selecting segmentation criteria for potential customers, and creating at least three customer groups or customer personas based on these criteria. The target audience, i.e. the one most likely to purchase the product or service, should then be selected. It is important that the criteria are chosen as precisely as possible in order to target the group that is most interested in the offer and most likely to buy.

Target Group: where to start?

DrySEO’s team of specialists will help you identify the optimal target audience for your business. By carefully defining your segmentation criteria and building customer personas, you will be able to better tailor your offer to your customer’s needs and expectations. Contact us today to find out how we can help you increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and Generate Leads.