How to Define Your Target Market

Without a properly defined target audience any attempt to effectively spend and evaluate an advertising budget becomes more of a guessing game than a strategy, which is why Media Link Software® is utilized by advertising professionals to get the most bang for the buck.

The first questions you should be asking include;

• Who are my best customers right now?
• Where do they live?
• What are their ages?
• Does this vary depending on which product/service they seek?
• If there are different audiences, can you group them into separate target markets?  

Research steps at this stage are crucial for long-term success. It is often advantageous to focus on certain groups of people within a single area or subsection of that area. Attempting to evaluate larger regions, can diffuse the data and will make it more difficult to draw actionable conclusions. So, your first step may be identifying that you want to reach married women in Minneapolis/St. Paul ages 35-54.

At this point, we would like to point out Media Link Software® has several ways to define such a market for use in your advertising campaign. If you subscribe to Nielsen for your area, you can simply download and save that data. If you do not, Media Link Software® allows you to select the counties to make up your market. Here’s a link to a map showing which counties go with which market.  After selecting your counties, Media Link Software® pulls the data directly from the US Census Bureau database.

Now in many circumstances you may wish to further define your market, especially when it comes to digital campaigns. Picking the best combination of targeting parameters is an entire career field on its own. The answer does not remain static for a single product for very long. You may also be targeting groups of people uncounted by the US Census Bureau. You can set up a custom scenario with the help of the Media Link Software® team.

Once you have your target market(s) then the proper strategy can begin.