Marketing research of the target audience

Understanding your target audience will increase your company's financial performance. The desires of your consumers change from day to day. At the same time, up to 85% of consumers are ready to change a brand, provided that they are offered something better. What exactly to offer consumers of competing brands is the task of researching the target audience.

A company that uses data about its consumer profile has every opportunity to successfully compete in the market. Incorrect definition of the target audience entails an increase in budgets for product promotion and lost profits. Therefore, it is important to create and use the most detailed portrait possible.

Popular areas of target audience research:

1. Portrait of the core target audience;
2. Segmentation of the target audience (shares, capacity and portraits of segments);
3. U&A research (needs, features of use)
4. Studying the customer journey
5. Consumer price sensitivity

The minimum size of a representative sample for such projects per region is 400 questionnaires. By region we mean any territory for which separate analytics is required (this could be, for example, a city or a country as a whole). In cases where it is necessary to separately consider and compare data from, for example, 2 cities, the minimum sample is 800 questionnaires. The minimum period for such a survey is 1 business day.

The cost of a project to draw up a portrait of the target audience consists of the cost of collecting a selected number of questionnaires (payment is taken only for fully completed questionnaires) and the cost of analytics (usually no more than 10-15% of the cost of data collection)

You can calculate the cost of one questionnaire yourself using our calculator (you will need to enter the number of open and closed questions in the questionnaire, quotas)

The cost of such a study is from 2000 £ (the cost is indicated for a minimum sample).

A portrait is a socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioral description of a consumer. The simplest example of using data about a consumer portrait: advertising of goods uses images of people corresponding to the gender, age, social characteristics of the target audience (appearance, speech of models in advertising), while the delivered messages use data from behavioral characteristics, motivation for purchase (phrases , music, actions of models in advertising).

An expanded portrait of the target audience, in addition to the listed characteristics, includes additional parameters, such as: average bill, average purchase volume (this can be quantity, weight or other characteristic), assortment preferences, preferences by place of purchase, preferences of advertising channels. In other words, this is information that can be used both to assess the attractiveness of individual segments of the target audience, and to implement an overall promotion program.

The research is conducted using quantitative methods (personal, telephone or online surveys).

BCGroup’s project on researching the portrait of the target audience is structured as follows:

1. An NDA (confidentiality agreement) is signed between BCGroup and the company;
2. A BCGroup specialist agrees with the customer on the final version of the survey questionnaire;
3. BCGroup specialists conduct the survey in a short time (it is possible to survey up to 5,000 people per day, depending on the volume of the questionnaire);
4. Next, the BCGroup employee transfers the data array to the customer’s representative in Excel or SPSS format;
5. After 5-7 days, a BCGroup employee sends an analytical report to the customer based on the results of a study to draw up a portrait of the target audience (sample reports)

In addition to drawing up a general portrait of the target audience consumer segmentation is often in demand. Segmentation allows you to select, for example, 8-10 segments of the target audience. As a rule, the TOP 3 segments (by financial capacity) provide more than 80% of revenue. It is recommended to focus the company’s marketing efforts on these segments.