How to collect an audience for targeting

If the portrait of your target audience currently looks like «females, aged 25-40, married», then don’t be surprised if your targeted ads aren’t working. Collecting an audience should not be limited only by age, gender, marital status and country of residence. Such audiences are very blurred and are unlikely to bring the desired result.

So that the advertising budget is not wasted, the target audience must be studied and segmented in detail. The following five questions will help you during the study process:

1. Under what conditions will the client use your services? Let’s imagine that you own a beauty salon. Usually, it is women who visit beauty salons. But when? Before important events, of course. Corporate, wedding, New Year, etc. This data is useful for creating advertisements.
2. What is your potential buyer interested in? For example, women who visit our salon are likely to be interested in the latest fashion trends, cosmetics, and visiting the gym.
3. What additional services might the audience need? Clients can also be interested in massage, manicure, and hair removal. By answering this question, you will understand whether you should look for your target audience in competitor’s groups.
4. What should a person who wants to become your client have? It all depends on the service. If the key service of the salon is cosmetology, then your target audience is girls with skin problems.
5. What will customer pains be solved by purchasing the product? For example, women who visit the salon will no longer have problems with their hair, skin, and nails.

It is the initial stage of collecting the target audience. Take your time, think over each question, you can record the answers in an Excel document or draw up a special mind map.

After that, proceed to the second stage, that is, to direct segmentation. To do this, you can use one of the following methods:

• Facebook audience collection via pixel. In fact, a pixel is a piece of code that is installed on a site. Thanks to it, the effectiveness of advertising is measured, and the behavior of visitors to your site is studied.
• Manually gathering your Instagram audience via hashtags or geotags. It is necessary to collect profiles published with relevant hashtags or noted in the selected city and exclude bots and commercial accounts from the list of their followers.
• Look-alike audiences. It is a tool that allows you to find users whose behavior is similar to the behavior of people from the original group. As such groups, you can choose a ready-made audience, for example, clients from CRM or any other saved audience.

As you can see, gathering an audience for targeted advertising is not a very complicated process, but it is very painstaking. It requires attentiveness, curiosity and creativity. The more you know about your target audience, the higher the chances that users will not pass your ad and definitely use a service or purchase a product.