You’re Doing One Thing Wrong When Targeting New Audiences

“Who is my target audience?” The key question every marketer worth their salt always has running through their mind when crafting a campaign. And here is where the problem begins.

Cognitively it’s far easier for us to associate with people than with concepts. So when we begin to craft the perfect target audience that makes us lean naturally towards crafting a profile. We want that ideal customer profile.

This ideal customer profile focuses on the people that fit into the consumer groups that are most likely to buy from you based on past performance. What did all those past buyers have in common? And where can I find similar consumers to message? All seems pretty straightforward and best practice so far.

However, the issue is — by assuming you can only find the new customers in a similar group to your past customers, however unconsciously, you have now moved away from your buying audience. You’re now focusing on a demographic.

A demographic does not necessarily = a buying audience.

You’ve made a large, but subtle, shift that disadvanatages your planning. Just because someone fits into the same demographic as historical buyers doesn’t guarentee they have the same kind of buying behaviour.

1. These people buy. You love them. You want more of them.
2. These buyers all share the same characteristics and can therefore be classified into a particular group i.e. a demographic.
3. This demographic of people are all, prior performance tells you, the most likely to buy more from you and therefore the best source of new customers.

By using demographics as the core of your ideal customer profile, you then plan your campaign around converting everyone in group 3, and have slipped away from your core buying audience.

Some in the demographic are indeed the right people to be targeting, that’s everyone in group 2. But you’ve just ignored all those other buyers in group 1 that don’t fit into your demographic profile. Whoops.

So how do you avoid the cognitive trap of focusing only on demographics rather than the buying audience? You work primarily from purchase behaviour, and that requires purchase data.

So here’s the trick- rather than assuming new customers can be found in a group with similar characteristics, focus instead on the group with the similar behaviours. Behaviours that show they want to buy from you.

So how do I identify people with the similar buying behaviours to my previous customers? This is where modelling purchase behaviour trends off purchase data comes into play.

If you model future behaviours off past purchases then the demographic that the buyer belongs to becomes less of a concern- the fact they’re a buyer now truly trumps other variables.

So the trick now becomes working with partners who are amazing at modelling future purchase behaviour from unique purchase data…