research on target market

Root out friction in every digital experience, super-charge conversion rates, and optimize digital self-service

Uncover insights from any interaction, deliver AI-powered agent coaching, and reduce cost to serve

Increase revenue and loyalty with real-time insights and recommendations delivered to teams on the ground

Know how your people feel and empower managers to improve employee engagement, productivity, and retention

Take action in the moments that matter most along the employee journey and drive bottom line growth

Whatever they’re saying, wherever they’re saying it, know exactly what’s going on with your people

Get faster, richer insights with qual and quant tools that make powerful market research available to everyone

Run concept tests, pricing studies, prototyping + more with fast, powerful studies designed by UX research experts

Track your brand performance 24/7 and act quickly to respond to opportunities and challenges in your market

Explore the platform powering Experience Management

• Free Account
• Product Demos
• For Digital
• For Customer Care
• For Human Resources
• For Researchers
• Financial Services
• All Industries

Popular Use Cases

• Customer Experience
• Employee Experience
• Net Promoter Score
• Voice of Customer
• Customer Success Hub
• Product Documentation
• Training & Certification
• XM Institute
• Popular Resources
• Customer Stories
• Artificial Intelligence

Market Research

• Partnerships
• Marketplace

The annual gathering of the experience leaders at the world’s iconic brands building breakthrough business results, live in Salt Lake City.

• English/AU & NZ
• Español/Europa
• Español/América Latina
• Português Brasileiro
• REQUEST DEMO
• Experience Management
• Brand Experience

Market Segmentation

• Target Market

Try Qualtrics for free

Target market: definition, purpose, examples, & best practices.

11 min read Aiming for your target market with a highly focused marketing strategy is now easier than ever with the support of insights from data and machine learning. Read our in-depth guide to learn how to successfully reach your target market.

What is a target market?

A target market is a subset of the audience you’re aiming to reach (your market). It is made up of a group of customers that have one or more commonalities between them and are most likely to be interested in your products.

These commonalities might be:

• Demographic targeting : They all have common features, such as age, income level, family status, level of disposable income, and marital status
• Psychographic segmentation : They all hold common interests, values, wants, goals, political leanings or lifestyle choices
• Behavioral patterns: They all have common behaviors, such as when they purchase a product or how often they buy
• Geographic segmentation : They are all located in the same region or local area

There are other factors that might group your target market’s members together, and, more often than not, there might be a blend of multiple factors. Keep in mind that there’s also a slight variation if you are looking for B2B customers, as this might include:

• Firmographics: The details about the businesses you’re targeting, such as industry, company size, global or regional spread
• Buying style: The businesses’ buying policies, budgets or stakeholder involvement
• Company behavior: How much they purchase and when, their appetite for risk

Free eBook: 2024 global market research trends report

What is target marketing?

Target marketing is the process of reaching out to particular market segments of your potential customers or your existing audience. This target market is defined by their commonality as mentioned above, usually within a range, such as consumers aged 25-45 or those working in the hospitality industry.

Your marketing strategy will be tailored to that particular niche market, and will encompass all the channels that the target audience might use. Your marketing should be based on market research and take into account the needs and wants of that specific group. Ideally, this means that you have data-led insights about your target market to allow you to create digital marketing or offline marketing strategies that work effectively.

What is consumer targeting?

Where your target market is the broader group of individuals that have a feature in common, your target consumers are the individuals you believe are most likely to purchase your product or service. Your marketing efforts for consumer targeting will be aimed at a more specific audience, such as 35-year-olds or hotel managers.

Consumer targeting vs market segmentation

Consumer targeting is the process of marketing to the specific audience you think will potentially buy your products, based on data-led insights on prior sales data and more.

Market segmentation is a broader process, being the general division of your entire potential audience into target markets, based on the features they share or the products and services they’d be interested in.

Both are necessary processes to narrow down the focus of your marketing efforts for the best results.

Why should you create a target marketing strategy?

Creating a marketing strategy for a specific target market has several advantages over a more general approach.

• You’re more likely to reach an audience interested in your products or services. Having a clear idea of who would be most interested in your offering means you don’t waste time marketing to those who are less likely to buy.
• You can create a more appealing and effective marketing strategy. Knowing your target audiences’ distinct features means you can create a marketing approach that will be more appealing to them.
• You’ll stand out from the competition. By honing in on your target customers and adapting your strategy accordingly, you’ll be ahead of the 76% of marketing executives that don’t use behavioral data to target their marketing efforts .
• You’re able to target and retarget your audience for better outcomes. Comscore found that retargeting customers led to a 1046% uplift in searches for the advertised brand.
• You can discover which customers are more likely to pay a premium for your product. Increase profitability and revenue by targeting the target audience with the highest ROI.

How to target market segments

Step 1: finding your target markets.

Whether you’re planning on exploring target markets for a new or an established business, market research will be vital to discover the most fertile areas for growth. Here are a few ideas on how to define your target market:

Study your current customers

Your current customers have a wealth of information that can help you create a marketing plan for your ideal target market. By gathering data, either through customer feedback channels such as surveys or focus groups, or by examining operations data such as customer purchase patterns, you can develop a persona that describes your ideal customer. What common characteristics do your biggest spenders have? Start by sending a survey with open-ended questions to a small representative sample of customers, perhaps 300 or more, to understand their values in their own words.

Examine the competition

Your competitors are likely targeting the same audiences as you. Analyze how they promote their product or service, and see how their ideal customer responds. What are they providing that you don’t, and what can you give customers that isn’t currently on the market?

Understand the motivations for purchase

Your customers are often telling you in their own words how they feel about your offering and why they have chosen your brand—you just need to listen. Use sophisticated listening tools, such as conversation analytics, to understand things such as customer intent, emotion, effort, and motivation. This will help you build a more solid picture of what your ideal target market looks like, and what challenges your offering solves for them.

Identify groups of customers

Your target markets will be made up of groups of ideal customers. What key characteristics link them together? Build a list of target markets, all defined by distinct features that you can target with your marketing efforts.

Create personas

Developing a persona, or a fictional character that embodies the type of customer you’d like to pinpoint, means you can better reach your target audience. Identify their roles, goals, and pain points and understand how they like to communicate. By helping them reach goals, fulfill role requirements and solving their pain points, you can better hone your marketing efforts.

Judge near-term vs longer-term opportunities

Not all your target markets will be worth targeting in the near term, perhaps because of the time of year, their growth projections and other factors. It’s a good idea to consider which target market is right for immediate targeting, and which segments are better kept for the longer term.

Evaluate product-market fit and positioning

Where will your value proposition have the most impact? Your product market fit will not be the same for every target market you identify, and sometimes you can position your product more effectively for one market than another. Evaluate which target markets will provide the greatest ROI and focus efforts there first.

Understand how to reach your target audience

Your target market will have preferences for how they want to engage with your brand. Learning how they interact with you by examining internal data and analyzing customer behavior will help you to speak to your target market on the platforms they prefer.

Step 2: Create an effective targeting strategy

There is the option of engaging in mass marketing, creating marketing campaigns designed to reach as many people as possible. However, for an effective strategy, you should forgo the entire market and target only the markets and customers you believe will be responsive.

Consider which marketing strategy will be most effective

Mass marketing is a one-size-fits-all approach that won’t have the same impact as targeting a specific audience. Here are some alternatives:

Differentiated marketing: This marketing strategy develops different marketing campaigns for each target market’s preferences. This helps to demonstrate your value proposition for each target audience, rather than marketing generally about your products and services. This may require more initial budget, as various marketing campaigns will be needed, but is more likely to have a greater impact on each individual target market.

Niche marketing: Through your market research, you may have identified a particular market where a small target audience has needs that are not being met by the offerings of your competitors. Creating a highly targeted marketing campaign for this specific audience can be lucrative if the gap in the market is not being served and if the potential purchases by this audience will be high in value.

Micromarketing: Even more targeted than niche marketing is micro marketing. Taking a small segment of your already-small niche market, you divide the audience into further characteristics that unite them, such as geographic location. Again, focusing on this hyper-specific target market can pay dividends if their potential spend outweighs the cost of serving them such a specific marketing campaign.

Create an omnichannel strategy with customer preferences in mind

Your market research should have uncovered how your target audience prefers to communicate. Frequently, the purpose of the engagement—to buy a product, resolve a query, find an answer—dictates how customers want to be reached. As a result, it’s best to create an omnichannel marketing strategy that can guide audiences on a personalized customer journey.

Step 4. Implement and learn

Once you’ve established your target market and understand how to reach them, it’s time to test your marketing campaigns and targeted advertising, and then learn from the response. Evaluations to consider include:

• What drives customers to purchase, and what has less of an effect on buying behaviors?
• Which target markets are the most lucrative, and why?
• What new market segments could be targeted with similar strategies?
• How measurable are the results of your strategies?
• How accessible are your strategies to all of your target customers?

Improve your customer targeting with Qualtrics

Enable more accurate customer targeting with in-depth research supported by Qualtrics’ range of business tools. The CoreXM platform allows you to collect and collate data for unrivaled insights into your target market for highly effective marketing.

Use AI-powered analytics and embedded machine learning to evaluate structured and unstructured data. Best of all, access all your data and insights that make an impact all on one platform.

Related resources

User personas 14 min read, mixed methods research 17 min read.

Analysis & Reporting

Data Saturation In Qualitative Research 8 min read

How to determine sample size 12 min read.

Focus Groups

Focus Groups 15 min read

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, request demo.

Ready to learn more about Qualtrics?

What Is a Target Market (And How to Find Yours)

The better you understand your target market, the more you’ll be able to focus your ads and reach the audience most likely to convert into customers.

Table of Contents

Your target market sets the tone for your entire marketing strategy — from how you develop and name your products or services right through to the marketing channels you use to promote them.

Here’s a hint before we dig in: Your target market is not “everyone” ( unless you’re Google ). Your task in defining your target market is to identify and understand a smaller, relevant niche so you can dominate it. It’s all about narrowing your focus while expanding your reach.

In this guide, we’ll help you learn who’s already interacting with your business and your competitors, then use that information to develop a clear target market as you build your brand .

Bonus: Get the free template to easily craft a detailed profile of your ideal customer and/or target audience.

What is a target market?

A target market is the specific group of people you want to reach with your marketing message . They are the people who are most likely to buy your products or services, and they are united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviors.

The more clearly you define your target market, the better you can understand how and where to reach your ideal potential customers. You can start with broad categories like millennials or single dads, but you need to get much more detailed than that to achieve the best possible conversion rates.

Don’t be afraid to get highly specific. This is all about targeting your marketing efforts effectively, not stopping people from buying your product.

People who are not included in your targeted marketing can still buy from you—they’re just not your top focus when crafting your marketing strategy. You can’t target everyone, but you can sell to everyone.

Your target market should be based on research, not a gut feeling . You need to go after the people who really want to buy from you, even if they’re not the customers you originally set out to reach.

What is target market segmentation?

Target market segmentation is the process of dividing your target market into smaller, more specific groups. It allows you to create a more relevant marketing message for each group.

Remember — you can’t be all things to all people. But you can be different things to different groups of people.

For example, as a vegetarian, I’ve eaten plenty of Impossible Burgers. I’m definitely a target customer. But vegetarians are a surprisingly small target market segment for Impossible Foods: only 10% of their customer base.

That’s why Impossible Foods’ first national advertising campaign was definitely not targeted at me:

https://www.facebook.com/ImpossibleFoods/videos/158779836141556

The target market segment for this ad campaign was “meat eaters who haven’t yet tried Impossible products.”

Vegetarians and meat eaters have different reasons for eating plant-based burgers and want different things from the experience. Target market segmentation ensures the company reaches the right audience with the right message.

How to define your target market

Step 1. compile data on your current customers.

A great first step in figuring out who most wants to buy from you is to identify who is already using your products or services. Once you understand the defining characteristics of your existing customer base, you can go after more people like that.

Depending on how someone connects with your business, you might have only a little information about them, or a lot.

This doesn’t mean you should add a lot of questions to your order or opt-in process just for audience research purposes — this can annoy customers and result in abandoned shopping carts.

But do be sure to use the information you naturally acquire to understand trends and averages .

Your CRM is a goldmine here. UTM parameters combined with Google Analytics can also provide useful information about your customers.

Some data points you might want to consider are:

• Age: You don’t need to get too specific here. It won’t likely make a difference whether your average customer is 24 or 27. But knowing which decade of life your customers are in can be very useful.
• Location (and time zone): Where in the world do your existing customers live? In addition to understanding which geographic areas to target, this helps you figure out what hours are most important for your customer service and sales reps to be online, and what time you should schedule your social ads and posts to ensure best visibility.
• Language: Don’t assume your customers speak the same language you do. And don’t assume they speak the dominant language of their (or your) current physical location.
• Spending power and patterns: How much money do your current customers have to spend? How do they approach purchases in your price category?
• Interests: What do your customers like to do, besides using your products or services? What TV shows do they watch? What other businesses do they interact with?
• Challenges: What pain points are your customers facing? Do you understand how your product or service helps them address those challenges?
• Stage of life: Are your customers likely to be college students? New parents? Parents of teens? Retirees?

If you’re selling B2B products, your categories will look a little different. You might want to collect information about the size of businesses that buy from you, and information about the titles of the people who tend to make the buying decisions. Are you marketing to the CEO? The CTO? The social marketing manager?

Step 2. Incorporate social data

Social media analytics can be a great way of filling out the picture of your target market. They help you understand who’s interacting with your social accounts, even if those people are not yet customers.

These people are interested in your brand. Social analytics can provide a lot of information that might help you understand why. You’ll also learn about potential market segments you may not have thought to target before.

You can also use social listening to help identify the people who are talking about you and your product on social media, even if they don’t follow you.

If you want to reach your target market with social ads, lookalike audiences are an easy way to reach more people who share characteristics with your best customers.

Step 3. Check out the competition

Now that you know who’s already interacting with your business and buying your products or services, it’s time to see who’s engaging with the competition.

Knowing what your competitors are up to can help you answer some key questions:

• Are your competitors going after the same target market segments as you are?
• Are they reaching segments you hadn’t thought to consider?
• How are they positioning themselves?

Our guide on how to do competitor research on social media walks you through the best ways to use social tools to gather competitor insights.

You won’t be able to get detailed audience information about the people interacting with your competitors, but you’ll be able to get a general sense of the approach they’re taking and whether it’s allowing them to create engagement online.

This analysis will help you understand which markets competitors are targeting and whether their efforts appear to be effective for those segments.

Step 4. Clarify the value of your product or service

This comes down to the key distinction all marketers must understand between features and benefits. You can list the features of your product all day long, but no one will be convinced to buy from you unless you can explain the benefits .

Features are what your product is or does. The benefits are the results. How does your product make someone’s life easier, or better, or just more interesting?

If you don’t already have a clear list of the benefits of your product, it’s time to start brainstorming now. As you create your benefit statements, you’ll also by default be stating some basic information about your target audience.

For example, if your service helps people find someone to look after their pets while they’re away, you can be pretty confident that your market will have two main segments: (1) pet owners and (2) existing or potential pet-sitters.

If you’re not sure exactly how customers benefit from using your products, why not ask them in a survey, or even a social media poll ?

You might find that people use your products or services for purposes you haven’t even thought of. That might, in turn, change how you perceive your target market for future sales.

Step 5. Create a target market statement

Now it’s time to boil everything you’ve discovered so far into one simple statement that defines your target market. This is actually the first step in creating a brand positioning statement , but that’s a project for another day. For now, let’s stick to creating a statement that clearly defines your target market.

For example, here’s Zipcar’s brand positioning statement, as cited in the classic marketing text Kellogg on Marketing . We’re interested in the first part of the statement, which defines the target market:

“To urban-dwelling, educated, techno-savvy consumers who worry about the environment that future generations will inherit, Zipcar is the car-sharing service that lets you save money and reduce your carbon footprint, making you feel you’ve made a smart, responsible choice that demonstrates your commitment to protecting the environment.”

Zipcar is not targeting all residents of a particular city. They’re not even targeting all the people in a given city who don’t own a car. They’re specifically targeting people who:

• live in an urban area
• have a certain degree of education
• are comfortable with technology
• are concerned about the environment

These are all interests and behaviors that Zipcar can specifically target using social content and social ads .

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Zipcar (@zipcar)

They also help to guide the company’s overall approach to its service, as evidenced by the rest of the positioning statement.

When crafting your target market statement, try to incorporate the most important demographic and behavior characteristics you’ve identified. For example:

Our target market is [gender(s)] aged [age range], who live in [place or type of place], and like to [activity].

Don’t feel like you need to stick to these particular identifiers. Maybe gender is irrelevant for your market, but you have three or four key behaviors to incorporate in your statement.

If you offer multiple products or services, you might need to create a target market statement for each market segment. In this case, it’s useful to define buyer personas .

Target market examples

Nike target market.

Despite its current market domination, Nike actually provides a great example of what can go wrong when you try to target too general of an audience.

Nike started out as a running shoe company. In the 1980s, they tried to expand their target market beyond runners to include anyone who wanted comfortable shoes. They launched a line of casual shoes, and it flopped.

Here’s the thing: Non-runners were already buying Nike shoes to walk to work, or for other casual purposes. Nike spotted this as an opportunity to expand. Instead, they diluted their brand promise, and the company actually started losing money.

The lesson, according to company founder Phil Knight?

“Ultimately, we determined that we wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company and the Nike brand to represent sports and fitness activities. Once you say that, you have focus.”

While Nike would certainly not stop casual users from buying its shoes, the company refocused everything from product development to marketing on its target market: athletes of all levels, from pro to beer league.

In fact, understanding the importance of focus led Nike into a highly effective strategy of target market segmentation. The brand has multiple target markets for its various product lines.

On social, that means they use multiple accounts to reach their different target market groups. No one account tries to be all things to all customers.

The post below from Nike’s general Instagram account targets the segment of their audience interested in fashion and lifestyle products.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike Basketball (@nikebasketball)

But the company also has channels dedicated to specific sports. Here’s an example of the content they create for runners:

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike Running (@nikerunning)

And that means … the brand has been able to return to marketing its products specifically for casual wear. It just reaches the casual target market through different channels than it uses for its athletic markets. It’s a different target market segment, and a different marketing message

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike Sportswear (@nikesportswear)

Like Nike, you might have one target market, or many, depending on the size of your brand. Remember that you can only speak effectively to one target market segment at a time.

Takasa target market

Takasa is a Canadian retail homewares company that specializes in organic, fair trade bedding and bath linens.

Here’s their target market as defined by founders Ruby and Kuljit Rakhra:

“ Our target market is the LOHAS segment, which means Family Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. This group of people is already living, or striving to live, a green lifestyle … We know our target demo is very conscious about what their families consume, as well as the impact this consumption has on the environment.”

In their social content, they clearly identify the product features most important to their target market: organic materials and fair labor practices.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Organic + Fairtrade Home Goods (@takasa.co)

The City of Port Alberni’s target market

Why does a city need a target market? In Port Alberni’s case, the city is working to “attract investment, business opportunities and new residents.” To that end, they launched a rebranding and marketing campaign.

And a marketing campaign, of course, needs a target market. Here’s how the city defined it:

“ Our target market is young people and young families 25 to 45 years of age who are entrepreneurial-minded, family oriented, adventurous, enjoy an active lifestyle, desire an opportunity to contribute to growth, well-educated and skilled professionals or tradespeople.”

In their social content, they highlight recreational opportunities aimed at those active and adventurous young families, even using the handle @PlayinPA.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by City of Port Alberni (@playinpa)

White House Black Market target market

White House Black Market is a women’s fashion brand. Here’s how they describe their target customer on their website :

“Our customer … is strong yet subtle, modern yet timeless, hard-working yet easy-going.”

That’s a fine description when talking directly to customers. But the marketing department needs a target market definition with a few more specifics. Here’s the detailed target market as described by the company’s former president:

“ Our target market is women [with a] median age of about 45 … at a stage in her life where she’s very busy, primarily a working woman. She’s probably got one or two kids left at home [or] … her children may be out of the house and on their way to college.”

With their hashtag #WHBMPowerhouse, they focus on this key demographic of women in their 40s with busy home lives and careers.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by White House Black Market (@whbm)

Use Hootsuite to better target your audience on social media. Create, schedule, and publish posts to every network, get demographic data, performance reports, and more. Try it free today.

Start your free 30-day trial

Do it better with Hootsuite , the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order.

Related Articles

How To Create Better Buyer Personas [Free Template]

A well-defined buyer persona—also called a customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona—will help you target your ideal customer.

How to create a social media marketing strategy in 9 easy steps [free template]

Creating your social media marketing strategy doesn’t need to be painful. Create an effective plan for your business in 9 simple steps.

How to Create a Social Media Report [Free Template Included]

A comprehensive social media report proves the value of your social marketing plan. It shows what you’ve accomplished, backed up by data.

21 of the Best Social Media Analytics Tools for 2024

Are you a social media marketer who wants to better focus your time, effort, and budget? It’s time for some new social media analytics tools!

How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

Access best-in-class company data

Get trusted first-party funding data, revenue data and firmographics

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry.

What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

• Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
• Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
• Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
• Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
• Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
• Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Cross-sectional research
• Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

• Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
• Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

• Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
• Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
• Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Online research tools
• Experiments
• Content analysis
• Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

• Set clear objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Choose your research methods
• Use the right market research tools
• Collect data
• Analyze data 
• Interpret your findings
• Identify opportunities and challenges
• Make informed business decisions
• Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

• Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

• Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
• Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
• Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
• Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

• Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
• Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
• Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
• Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

• Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
• SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
• HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
• SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
• SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

Related Articles

• Entrepreneurs
• 15 min read

What Is Competitive Analysis and How to Do It Effectively

Rebecca Strehlow, Copywriter at Crunchbase

17 Best Sales Intelligence Tools for 2024

• Market research
• 10 min read

How to Do Market Research for a Startup: Tips for Success

Jaclyn Robinson, Senior Manager of Content Marketing at Crunchbase

Search less. Close more.

Grow your revenue with Crunchbase, the all-in-one prospecting solution. Start your free trial.

• Start free trial

Start selling with Shopify today

Start your free trial with Shopify today—then use these resources to guide you through every step of the process.

What Is a Target Market and How Do You Find Yours? (Examples Included)

Your target market underpins everything your business does, from products to marketing campaigns. Here are the five steps to uncover yours and put that research to use.

Knowing your ideal target market might seem like one of many boxes to check on your “ starting a business ” list, but it’s arguably the most important part of the process.

Your target market underpins everything your business does, from the product you create to the marketing campaigns you build. You can’t sell to anyone and everyone. Limiting the audience you target actually improves your total number of sales, because the marketing messages you’re delivering are highly relevant .

To set up a business right, you need to know who your target market is, which means figuring out not just who they are but how they behave and what they want or need. You’ll then be able to find ways to reach them about what matters most to them while ignoring other potential customers that will never see the relevance in what you’re offering, and vice versa. —Darren Litt, co-founder of Hiya Health

So, how do you define your target market? And more importantly, how do you turn a pretty PDF or slide deck into money for your ecommerce business? This guide shares the answers .

Get your free brand positioning template

Stand out from the competition and make your brand the go-to choice for customers with our brand positioning analysis.

What is a target market?

A target market is the specific group of people most likely to buy your products or services. They’re the people you should be laser focused on attracting—the type of people who return again, recommend you to their friends, and rave about you on social media. 

How to define your target market

Many small business owners create products they wish they had. Take footwear brand Allbirds , for example. The brand started after its founder, Tim Brown, struggled to find shoes made with merino wool. Allbirds was created to fill the gap, with Tim being its first customer and target market. 

Nevertheless, continuing on the “I am my own customer” path for too long is dangerous. Making assumptions about your target audience based on your own personal thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can kill the target market research process. What your paying customers want can vary dramatically from the product you want to create.

Say you’re anti-Facebook, and deleted your account in protest of its privacy settings. If your target market is just like you, you’d strike Facebook advertising from your marketing campaign ideas. In practice, however, you may be hampering your ability to reach a subset of your potential customers who have most things in common with you.

*You are a sample size of 1* You do not represent your entire target market, intended audience, or customer base. In fact, there's a good chance you behave very differently than your potential customers, so using your own behavior as a heuristic could be disastrous. — Corey Haines 💡 (@coreyhainesco) December 16, 2020

Researching multiple target markets doesn’t have to be complex if you’re just starting out, but it helps to have a minimum viable target market—the bare minimum you need to know about your ideal customer before diving in. Hiya Health co-founder Darren Litt recommends looking for answers to the following questions:

• Who will benefit the most from your product or service? 
• Who’s going to be touching this product? 
• Why do they need your product or service? 
• What difference does this product make compared to its competitors?

Here’s how you can find the answers.

• Host focus groups

Starting your market research from scratch with no existing customer data? The quickest way to get immediate feedback is to host a focus group: a group of eight to 10 people who give honest feedback on your soon-to-launch product .

You *need* to talk to people in your target market that aren't in a sales cycle. So many people rely on Sales for feedback. People don't tell the truth when money is involved. — Andrew Allsop (@AndrewAllsop) August 12, 2021

Advertise that you’re looking for people to take part in a research study. Give people an incentive to participate, such as a free product or $25 gift card. If you’re researching the target market for a new wine brand, for example, host a wine and cheese evening at a local vineyard. The more relaxed and engaged people are at the focus group session, the more likely they are to give honest, free-flowing answers. 

Or, host the focus group online via web conferencing tools like Zoom. That way, you can invite people from all over the world without limiting research to opinions from people in a specific area. 

When selecting people to join the focus group, go broad with your criteria—especially if it’s your first dip into the market research world. Remember: assumptions on who might buy your product can lead you down the wrong path. There’s always the option to niche down once you’ve excluded a specific group that definitely isn’t your target market. 

At the event, ask open-ended questions like:

• What qualities do you look for in brands you purchase from? 
• What would need to happen in your life for you to buy this product?
• If you don’t picture yourself buying this, who would you buy the item for as a gift? 

Don’t be afraid to dive into rabbit holes. Instead of a one-way survey conversation, you can really pull on the thoughts, feelings, and stories people have to share when you’re communicating face to face (or screen to screen). Ask open-ended questions and pull out interesting parts in their response for further discussion .

After all of these steps, it’s important to evaluate your decision. Ensure that your target audience has enough people in it, that these people will benefit from your product or service, that they can afford it, and that you are able to reach them with your message. This is the final step to finding your target market. —Justin Chan, Growth Manager at June Shine

• Survey existing customers

“Your current customers are a great resource,” says Jean Gregoire, CEO of Lovebox . She’s right: existing customers have handed over their hard-earned cash in exchange for your product. In many cases, following the money leads directly to your target market. 

Jean advises, “Figure out why they’re buying from you. Do they have any similar interests? Then, look at your product or service in-depth. What key characteristics does it have? What are its features and benefits? Once you have that information, you can figure out what types of customers would benefit from your product.”

Look at the existing data in your ecommerce back end. For instance, customers will share their postal address for shipping purposes. Assemble that data in one spreadsheet to find your most popular locations. 

You could also add a date of birth field to your post-purchase account creation page. Give customers a free gift or discount code on their birthday in exchange for age-related information for your target market research. 

Collect more data on autopilot by adding a customer survey in your purchase confirmation emails. Keep the survey short and sweet to encourage new customers to share their feedback. Ask a mixture of demographic and psychographic questions like:

• What is your education level?
• How do you spend your free time? 
• Why did you choose to buy our product? 
• What was happening in your life around this time? 
• Which channels did you use to discover this product? 

Apps like POWR Customer Survey , Zigpoll , and Fairing Post Purchase Surveys can also do this for you if you’d prefer your purchase confirmation emails to be clutter free. 

Either way, look for common denominators in the answers you get. Thoughts, behaviors, and personality traits you see repeated are those your paying customers have in common—and your target market does too .

By taking a deep look at how your brand can help certain consumers, you’ll be able to pinpoint who those consumers are. —Jean Gregoire, CEO of Lovebox

• Keep tabs on competitors

In a crowded marketplace, knowing your competitors’ target markets can help you narrow your focus, especially if the products you’re selling are largely the same. 

Toothpaste brands are a prime example. If you analyze the formulas of popular toothpastes, you’ll notice very little difference. Retailers in the space stand out with strong branding tailored toward a specific target market.

Make a list of competitors in your niche market. Find them by asking this question in your customer feedback surveys: Did you consider any other products before deciding to purchase ours? If so, who were they and what made you choose us? 

While it’s highly unlikely for each of these competitors to freely share information about its audience, you can do some detective work by:

• Searching the brand’s name on social media
• Looking at influencers each brand partners with
• Investigating customer reviews and case studies

In marketing my Shopify store, Dead Sea Trading Co., I looked at my biggest competitor and used Alexa.com to determine that their target market was women ages 35 to 65+ who earn more than $100,000 per year. In order to reach this market, I started a free online book club for women in that age group and included ads for Dead Sea Trading Co., where appropriate. The results have been impressive and the traffic to my store has increased threefold since starting the book club. —Mitchell Stern, owner of Side Hustle Tips

While competitive analysis is a good starting point for your own target market research, the goal is to stand out from them. That’s why Justin Chan, growth manager at JuneShine , advises using this data to “find a niche market which they are overlooking.”

Justin says, “It is useful to find your own niche, because it gives you a way to stand out in the crowd. You are able to have a targeted market that looks to you for this product. At JuneShine, we have a super-specific niche of alcoholic kombucha. It mixes the want to be healthy and still enjoy a delicious beverage. ”

• Dive into existing research

Once you’ve got a solid understanding of the types of people in your target market, dig deeper into the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they share through existing industry research.

The following platforms share consumer behavior trends to lean into:

• McKinsey & Company
• Pew Research Center  

McKinsey published a “ State of Grocery in North America ” report, which grocery store owners can use to define their target markets by focusing on those shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables.

“There are many tools to help you do a deep dive on your target audience, but keyword research can reveal more intimate and private pain points that customers or brands may not be open to talking about,” Marquis Matson, VP of Growth at Sozy , adds. “Mental health issues, relationship struggles, body image issues … these are all revealed in keyword research.”

But remember: target market research needs real concrete data, not assumptions. That’s why Marquis adds, “To validate the topics, I talk to the customer support and social media teams to learn about what actual customers are talking about. Listening to what customers are saying and how they’re saying it informs my strategy for all content that goes on the website.

“Once you have buying customers, then you have information about the people most likely to buy your products. That can get you pretty far in your target audience research.”

By platform or sales channel

Ecommerce brands have different target audiences across the platforms and sales channels they sell on. A retailer selling handmade goods , for example, will have different target markets for its:

• Etsy profile  
• Ecommerce website
• Brick-and-mortar store

People buying through the brand’s online store will be different from those visiting its Houston brick-and-mortar store. Location is the most obvious difference: selling online opens you up to reach potential customers all over the world. You don’t get that luxury with a physical store (unless you’re in a tourist destination). 

Similarly, the platforms you’re marketing your business through have varying target markets. Those who discover products through Instagram likely follow one of the many influencers using the platform to make a living. The target market for Pinterest users, however, may prioritize handmade goods over mass manufactured ones. 

To define your target market for a particular platform or sales channel, repeat the steps we’ve covered. Survey existing customers who have found or purchased your products through each. Create Google Analytics segments for each referring source, then use the Ecommerce purchases report to find the most popular products for visitors from each channel :

Or, go directly to the platform itself. Many social media platforms have features for surveying your audience, including Instagram Story polls .

You could even host a giveaway where followers win something—like a free product—in exchange for information about your target market on that channel. “Comment below why you’d like to win” is a simple conversation starter to get your followers talking .

How big should my target market be?

Calculate your target market size by doing some desk research. Lean on free resources, like the ones listed below, to tell you how many people share the same traits you’ve defined. 

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a great resource to investigate jobs, income levels, and how people spend their free time. Statista also compiles data on how many people buy, watch, stream, or read something .

You could also use Facebook’s audience builder to see estimated sizes based on the interests, genders, and locations of your target market. (Important note: Facebook’s audience builder only includes data from its users, so you may want to avoid this technique if you’re aiming for a target market known not to use the platform.)

A common mistake marketers make when defining their target market is assuming that everyone is a customer. You may try to reach anyone and everyone with the hope they could turn into a customer if you strike your marketing message right. The total opposite occurs in reality.

If you’re unable to form a definition [of who your target market is], your marketing will come across as watered down, therefore essentially wasting money on people who have zero interest in what you’ll have to say. —Ecommerce Entrepreneur Sam Barrante

The same problem occurs if you go too niche. Sure, you can reach a smaller subset of people with uber-specific and personalized marketing messages. But a target market of 100,000 people, assuming the average conversion rate of 2.86%, equals just 2,860 paying customers. If they’re buying $50 products, that results in revenue of $143,000. Repeat customers can bump that figure upward, but it’s still not generating enough revenue to transform a lifestyle business into a larger one. 

There is no best practice for how big your target market should be. Certain industries are fundamentally larger than others. There are more people interested in buying groceries than there are people interested in buying Star Wars costumes, for example. 

As a rough guideline, assume you’ll achieve the average market penetration rate of 2% to 6% —the percentage of your target market who purchase your product. Multiply your market size by those percentages to see the very top end of achievable revenue. 

(For context: Apple claims 51.62% market share for mobile operating systems, hence why you see iOS products everywhere.)

How to segment and reach your target market

You don’t run marketing campaigns to reach your target market. That would be too broad. Segmenting your market to identify target audiences for individual campaigns is what helps you take action on your research. If you use Shopify, then Shopify Segmentation enables you to discover powerful insights about your customers.

So, break your target market down into smaller segments to create target audiences —a smaller subset of your target market who your marketing efforts are tailored to. Within those are buyer personas: fictional representatives for one target audience within your target market.

Take Great Little Trading Company ’s target market for example. Its ideal customers are parents with young children. But other variables, like parents’ geographic location, child’s age, and income level, all come into play. It would be a mistake for the retailer to disregard people who are parents to young children but don’t meet all three checkboxes. They’re still its target market—just a smaller segment of it. 

For common characteristics that appear in some potential customers but not others, consider them segments of your target market. Here are three popular ways to use this data for digital marketing.

Demographic segmentation

Demographic target market segmentation is the process of creating personas of people with shared characteristics, such as:

• Ethnicity 
• Generations (e.g., Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials, etc.)
• Income level
• Marital status
• Education level

Map out the percentage split between each demographic market segment and map your marketing budget accordingly. If you know half of your target audience is aged 40 to 65, for example, assign half of your marketing budget to campaigns tailored toward those people .

One example of [segmenting] is through paid advertising, where a company may select to only serve ads to a specific gender or a specific age range instead of all genders and age ranges. This can also be used in the form of interests where a company may choose to serve ads only to users who have displayed an interest in one or more specific fields. —Michael Anderson, Ecommerce Specialist at SIGNAL+POWER

Similarly, use the demographic information about each segment to personalize the marketing messages and products you’re promoting. You could create a Christmas gift guide with product recommendations for the following market segments:

• Income level. Create a gift guide of products $20 and under for those with a low income. 
• Family status. Recommend personalized “World’s Best Dad” products for married parents.
• Generation. Run an Instagram advertising campaign with influencer-endorsed recommended products to Gen Z target audiences. 

For a real example, look no further than Starbucks. Instead of gearing its marketing campaigns toward anyone who drinks coffee, the brand’s target market is young professionals who can afford to splash $5 on a daily coffee. We see this reflected in its TV advertisements , Facebook advertising campaigns , and TikTok videos .

It's important for ecommerce companies to define a target market so that they are not wasting time or ad spend on users who are not qualified to purchase specific products. Generally it costs money for users to see an advertisement, so businesses need to make sure that they are only advertising to the specific demographic group that is most likely to purchase their products. —Michael Anderson, Ecommerce Specialist at SIGNAL+POWER

Localization

Geographic segmentation refers to differences in the locations your target market is spread across, including:

• Language spoken
• Country, city, or continent 

Segmenting your target market by geographical data helps you personalize the shopping experience. Research shows that 66% of consumers expect the companies they purchase from to understand their needs. It’s why marketers who segment their customer base and personalize their emails see a 760% increase in revenue. 

Let’s put that into practice and cover four different ways to use localization:

• Configure Spanish translations on your Shopify store if a large segment speaks the language fluently. 
• Run Facebook ads to the segment of a popular city and reference local landmarks. 
• Create an Instagram shop with prices in CAD for your Canadian target market segment. 
• Recommend umbrellas and raincoats to your target audience in London.

Psychographic segmentation

Psychographic segmentation means dividing your target market into smaller groups based on psychological traits they share, such as: 

• Shopping habits  

Use this psychographic segmentation to tweak the messaging you’re giving to each. At its core, strong copywriting is tailored to its target audience. Reflect each segment’s opinions, values, and interests in the copy you put in front of them.

Take cosmetics retailer LUSH , for example. Part of its target market are people who stand against animal testing and are vegan. So, on its product page, you’ll find several nods to the causes its target market would want the brand to support :

What if my target market changes?

The target market you’ve defined for your business isn’t futureproof. Products develop, consumer buying trends change—both of which impact the type of person most likely to purchase your products. 

Bear in mind that running an ecommerce business requires constant refining and experimentation to help you identify your target market, even when you believe you have done so. The market, like your business, is constantly changing. The prudent business owner recognises this truth and constantly researches and modifies their tactics to meet the requirements. —Gerrid Smith, Chief Marketing Officer at Joy Organics

So, how do you know when to pivot? “When you feel that there’s too much competition in your niche or you realize you’re not attracting enough customers to be profitable, changing the direction of your business can put you on the path to success,” says Shaunak Amin, co-founder and CEO of SnackMagic .

Shaunak’s business is a great example. “My latest venture is a direct result of the global pandemic,” he says. “As nobody was in their offices but instead quarantined at home, we knew the joy of giving, and getting, a stash of snacks would help people feel connected and boost morale during the pandemic lockdown. What began as a temporary way to save our office-lunch delivery business became a beautiful, lasting pivot.”

SnackMagic’s product shifted to address a different need within the same target market—a change that still helped the business reach its goals.  

“From day one, we wanted to create a business, not necessarily a startup,” Shaunak says. “We wanted it to be an established business that has revenues, profits, losses, and unit economics from the get-go. So we used our existing runway from STADIUM to build SnackMagic. People were on our website just looking before we even launched, and our first order came within three weeks.”

The results were impressive: SnackMagic scaled from $0 to $20 million in annual recurring revenue in just eight months. “We’ve shipped thousands of SnackMagic snacks worldwide, and we’re just getting started,” Shaunak says.

Target market examples

Ready to put your research into action? Here are three examples of target markets to draw inspiration from.

Nike is a sportswear brand known for its market penetration. Nike products are sold in 170 countries , with millions of customers helping it generate $17.3 billion in revenue in the US alone. 

It’s clear Nike’s target market is broad. However, the brand segments its target market into smaller buckets and builds personalized experiences around each. For example, its advertising strategy has content geared toward specific market segments:

• Nike customers who belong to the Black and LGBTQIA+ community are targeted via Nike’s YouTube series .
• Nike’s “ Guide to Summering ” advert is targeted toward a subset of Nike’s target market who are interested in traveling. 
• Nike’s “ Toughest Athletes ” advert represents mothers interested in fitness.

While Nike is a brand that appeals to most people with a general interest in fitness, customers can’t help but feel like the brand gets them. It shows people who look, act, and feel the same way they do, through segmented advertising campaigns.

Often joked as being a “home away from home” for customers, McDonald’s also has a gigantic target market. Its online help portal even says :

“McDonald’s aims to offer a friendly, fun environment for everyone, and we mean everyone, to enjoy. This means appealing to families who love our iconic Happy Meal®, to workers grabbing breakfast on-the-go or eating in to enjoy our freshly ground coffee and free WiFi. The majority of our campaigns are communicated to everyone to ensure they have a broad reach. You may have seen us on TV or heard us on the radio!”

In the UK, the brand reaches several unique segments—like those who recently started a new job , are concerned about climate change , and spend their free time partying —with advertisements portraying people who fall into each.  

Plus, instead of driving all US customers back to English-language advertisements, it translates each Facebook ad campaign into Spanish for people in that language segment :

We all know Play-Doh as the modeling clay children use to make small sculptures. But the original target market for Play-Doh might come as a surprise. 

“Play-Doh was originally invented to be a wallpaper cleaner,” says Nick Saltarelli, co-founder of Mid-Day Squares . “It was invented based on an assumption of what the Kroger grocery chain believed could be a good use case for a specific target market. The product had decent success but fizzled over time.”

Nick adds, “It wasn’t until the founder’s daughter-in-law’s sister came to them with an intuitive idea she had for her nursery school students to explore their creativity, Play-Doh was born. Same product, different target market.”

Play-doh went on to be a smashing success and one of the bestselling children’s toys of all time. I believe the only difference between both ideas was that one was born of intuition. Nick Saltarelli, co-founder of Mid-Day Squares

Know who to reach—and how—with target market research

Your target market is the lifeline of your business. They’re the type of people who will put money into your bank account, become loyal customers, and refer you to their friends. But to show them you exist and convince them to make their first purchase, you need to know who they are.

Start your research by surveying existing customers, looking into your marketing analytics , spying on competitors, or hosting focus groups. Keep an eye out for trends the people most interested in your products share. 

But remember: not all of your target market has to have everything in common. Find the variables that segments of your target market share—like geographical location, income level, or hobbies and interests.

Using that research for strong positioning, messaging, and targeting of your target market is the key to building marketing campaigns that do their job: driving new customers.

Illustration by Till Lauer

Target market FAQ

A target market is the group of people most likely to purchase a specific product or service. It’s important for businesses to understand their target market, because members of this group are most likely to buy and recommend their products, improving the number of sales .

How do you define your target market?

Why is a target market important.

Target markets allow businesses to narrow the scope of their focus and manage a group of customers that are more likely to to buy their product and engage with their brand. Broad, “catch-all” marketing campaigns that attempt to appeal to everyone usually end up feeling generic to most customers .

Keep up with the latest from Shopify

Get free ecommerce tips, inspiration, and resources delivered directly to your inbox.

By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing emails from Shopify.

popular posts

The point of sale for every sale.

Subscribe to our blog and get free ecommerce tips, inspiration, and resources delivered directly to your inbox.

Unsubscribe anytime. By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing emails from Shopify.

Learn on the go. Try Shopify for free, and explore all the tools you need to start, run, and grow your business.

Try Shopify for free, no credit card required.

• Search Search Please fill out this field.

What Is a Target Market?

• Defining a Product's Target Market
• 4 Target Markets

Why Are Target Markets Important?

What are market segments, target market and product sales.

• Target Market FAQs

The Bottom Line

• Marketing Essentials

Target Market: Definition, Purpose, Examples, Market Segments

Investopedia contributors come from a range of backgrounds, and over 25 years there have been thousands of expert writers and editors who have contributed.

Investopedia / Mira Norian

A target market is a group of people that have been identified as the most likely potential customers for a product because of their shared characteristics, such as age, income, and lifestyle.

Identifying the target market is a key part of the decision-making process when a company designs, packages, and advertises its product.

Key Takeaways

• A target market is a group of customers with shared demographics who have been identified as the most likely buyers of a company's product or service.
• Identifying the target market is important in the development and implementation of a successful marketing plan for any new product.
• The target market also can inform a product's specifications, packaging, and distribution.

How Do I Define My Product's Target Market?

Part of creating a new product is envisioning the consumers who will buy it.

A new product must satisfy a need or solve a problem—or both. That need or problem is probably not universal (unless it reaches the level of indoor plumbing). More likely, it is needed by a subset of consumers, such as environmentally-conscious vegetarians, science nerds, or outdoor enthusiasts. It may appeal to a teenager or a middle-aged professional, a bargain-hunter or a snob.

Envisioning your likely target market is part of the process of creating and refining a product and informs decisions about its packaging, marketing, and placement.

What Are the 4 Target Markets?

Market researchers use activity, interest, and opinion (AIO) surveys to construct psychographic profiles of their target customers. Marketing professionals divide consumers into four major segments:

Demographic : These are the main characteristics that define your target market. Everyone can be identified as belonging to a specific age group, income level, gender, occupation, and education level.

Geographic : This segment is increasingly relevant in the era of globalization. Regional preferences need to be taken into account.

Psychographic : This segment goes beyond the basics of demographics to consider lifestyle, attitudes, interests, and values.

Behavioral : This is the one segment that relies on research into the decisions of a company's current customers. New products may be introduced based on research into the proven appeal of past products.

What Is an Example of a Target Market?

Each of the four target markets can be used to consider who the customer is for a new product.

For example, there are an estimated 49,773 Italian restaurants in the U.S. Clearly, they have enormous appeal.

But a corner pizza joint might appeal mostly—although by no means entirely—to a younger and more budget-conscious consumer, while an old-fashioned white tablecloth place might be frequented by older individuals and families who live in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, a newer venue down the street might cater to an upscale and trend-conscious crowd who will travel a good distance for the restaurant's innovative menu and fancy wine list.

In each successful case, a savvy business person has consciously considered the ideal target market for the restaurant and has tweaked the menu, decor, and advertising strategy to appeal to that market.

Few products today are designed to appeal to absolutely everyone. The Aveda Rosemary Mint Bath Bar, available for $26 per bar at Aveda beauty stores, is marketed to the upscale and eco-conscious woman who will pay extra for quality. Clé de Peau Beauté Synactif Soap retails for $110 a bar and is marketed to wealthy, fashion-conscious women who are willing to pay a premium for a luxury product. An eight-pack of Dial soap costs $11.49 at CVS, and it is known to get the job done.

Part of the success of selling a good or service is knowing whom it will appeal to and who will ultimately buy it. Its user base can grow over time through additional marketing, advertising, and word of mouth.

That's why businesses spend a lot of time and money in defining their initial target markets, and why they follow through with special offers, social media campaigns , and specialized advertising.

Dividing a target market into segments means grouping the population according to the key characteristics that drive their spending decisions. Some of these are gender, age, income level, race, education level, religion, marital status, and geographic location.

Consumers with the same demographics tend to value the same products and services, which is why narrowing down the segments is one of the most important factors in determining target markets.

For example, people who fall into a higher income bracket may be more likely to buy specialty coffee from Starbucks instead of relying on Dunkin' Donuts. The parent companies of both of these brands need to know that in order to decide where to locate their stores, where to stock their products, and where to advertise their brand.

A business may have more than one target market—a primary target market, which is the main focus, and a secondary target market, which is smaller but has growth potential. Toy commercials are targeted directly to children, and their parents are the secondary market.

Identifying the target market is an essential part of a product development plan, along with manufacturing, distribution, price, and promotion planning. The target market determines significant factors about the product itself. A company may tweak certain aspects of a product, such as the amount of sugar in a soft drink or the style of the packaging, so that it appeals more to consumers in its target group.

As a company’s product sales grow, it may expand its target market internationally. International expansion allows a company to reach a broader subset of its target market in other regions of the world.

In addition to international expansion, a company may find its domestic target market expands as its products gain more traction in the marketplace. Expanding a product's target market is a revenue opportunity worth pursuing.

How Detailed Should a Target Market Be?

It depends. Broadly speaking, a product may be designed for a mass market or a niche market, and a niche market can be a very small group indeed, especially in a product's early introductory phase.

Some carbonated beverages aim for a practically universal market. Coca-Cola had to branch out to 200 markets abroad to continue growing its customer base. Gatorade is owned by Pepsi Cola, but the brand is positioned as a drink for athletes. The soda brand Poppi, which is branded as a healthy, sparkling, prebiotic soda with real fruit juice and gut health and immunity benefits, is clearly aimed at a younger, healthier, and more trend-conscious target market.

Consider a casual apparel company that is working to build its distribution channels abroad. In order to determine where its apparel will be most successful, it conducts some research to identify its primary target market. It discovers that the people most likely to buy its products are middle-class women between the ages of 35 and 55 who live in cold climates.

It's reasonable for the company to focus its advertising efforts on northern European websites that have a strong female audience. But first, the company may consider how its apparel can be most attractive to that target market. It may revise its styles and colors and tweak its advertising strategy to optimize its appeal to this new prospective market.

What Is the Purpose of a Target Market?

A target market defines a product as well as vice versa. Once a target market is identified, it can influence a product's design, packaging, price, promotion, and distribution. A product aimed at men won't be packaged in pink plastic. A luxury cosmetic won't be sold in a pharmacy. An expensive pair of shoes comes with a branded cloth drawstring bag as well as a shoebox. All of those factors are signals to the target audience that they have found the right product.

Identifying the target market is part of the process of creating and refining a new product.

A target market can be translated into a profile of the consumer to whom a product is most likely to appeal. The profile considers four main characteristics of that person: demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral. These characteristics help determine who might purchase a company's product.

IBISWorld. " Italian Restaurants in the U.S. - Number of Businesses ."

Aveda. " Rosemary Mint Bath Bar ."

Cle de Peau. " Synactif Soap ."

CVS. " Dial Antibacterial Deodorant Bar Soap, White ."

Coca-Cola Australia. " Coca-Cola: From Start-Up to Global Enterprise ."

Pepsico Partners. " Gatorade ."

DrinkPoppi. " Home ."

• Terms of Service
• Editorial Policy
• Privacy Policy

How to do Market Analysis in 6 Easy Steps

Free Website Traffic Checker

Discover your competitors' strengths and leverage them to achieve your own success

Knowing how to do market analysis is pivotal for many roles, benefiting any organization, regardless of its size, scope, or sector.

Regular market analysis levels up your individual ability to spot potential opportunities, stay on top of current trends, and gives you insights into the competitive landscape .

This article will cover why you need to analyze a market frequently and shows you how to do a basic market analysis in 6 straightforward steps.

What is a market analysis?

Market analysis is the process of gathering data about a target market . It examines the competitive landscape, consumers, and conditions that impact the marketplace.

The benefits of market analysis

Here are eight reasons why a regular market analysis is beneficial:

• Understand the competitive landscape
• Spot trends in your market
• Uncover opportunities for growth or diversification
• Reduce either risk or cost for launching new products or services
• Develop a deeper understanding of a target audience
• Enhance marketing efforts or discover ways to change
• Analyze business performance within a market
• Identify new segments of a market to target

Why you should conduct a market analysis

Aside from the benefits we’ve already listed, reviewing and redoing your market analysis regularly is important . Here’s why.

• Markets shift
• Consumer behaviors change
• New players enter existing markets
• Disruptive technologies and enhancements to rival offerings can shift the landscape
• External events impact market conditions that drive changes

If you already know how to do market analysis, ask yourself how frequently you undertake the task: is it annually or quarterly? And consider the time it takes and the tools you used to obtain your information.

With this in mind, we’ll walk you through the most effective market analysis methods. Showing you the steps to take, with market analysis examples, to bring these steps to life.

How to conduct a market analysis

These six steps break down how to analyze a market into easy-to-follow, digestible stages.

Before you start: Use a framework to record your findings. There are plenty of visualization tools, but a basic excel sheet will be fine if you want to keep it simple. Why? Because when you return to review this analysis and repeat this exercise, you’ll want to have everything recorded in a single place. It will save you time and make any future comparisons easier.

Step 1 – Market segmentation

What: Whether you want to enter a new market , launch a new product, or simply assess opportunities for an existing business, this first step in the market analysis process is crucial yet often overlooked.

Why: Market segmentation helps you identify the core segments of a market to target. By identifying the portion of a market your products will be suitable for, you can accurately define the market size and better understand your potential customers’ specific needs and preferences.

How: There are multiple ways you can segment a market, and the right approach will depend on your product, its customers, and its target profiles.

Here, we can see how a segment is built using Similarweb’s website segment feature. I specifically want to view the credit card sector in the US, a market made up of pure players (think Amex or Visa ) and individual players with credit card lines as one of their segments (think Wells Fargo or USAA ). By splitting up a market like this, I can analyze the areas of business I care about more for my market analysis.

So, instead of viewing data that encompasses the other lines of business the likes of Wells Fargo and the USAA handle, such as loans, I get to hone in on their credit card segments only.

This is just one example of market segmentation. You can also segment a market based on consumer needs, ideal consumer profiles, regions, and other demographic data.

Step 2 – Market sizing

What: Market sizing determines your target market’s potential volume or sales revenue. It’s an essential component of market analysis that uses either secondary or primary research to explore the actual size of the market you are in or wish to enter. 

Total Addressable Market (TAM) – This gives you the complete value of the overall market and the first step in the market sizing process . Let’s say we want to analyze the US credit card market, the TAM would account for the whole of this market. Service Addressable Market (SAM) looks at potential audience volumes for a product or service in a target region. Sticking with the credit card sector example, this could be the total value of the credit card business that specifically targets the ‘poor credit rating’ segment of this market. Share of Market (SOM) – Also known as ‘service addressable market,’ it represents the proportion of your SAM that you are likely to achieve. SOM is always lower than SAM, taking a range of estimates based on the previous year’s performance or current market share + project growth to arrive at this figure.

Why: Market sizing helps businesses understand the size of their opportunity. By understanding the size and scope of a market, companies can better assess the potential profitability of the market. Tracking market share over time can also show who wins or loses at any given time.

Power-up Your Market Analysis with Similarweb Today

Market analysis example: market sizing

Using a metric known as traffic share , we can estimate the potential market size by showing the total reachable audience you have or could have with a product or service.

Using Similarweb Industry Analysis , I can see a real-time snapshot of my market’s performance. With it, I can see the total number of people in a market (unique visitors) and establish how much of that share I have or will target this year.

When sizing a market, it’s easy to fall into the habit of analyzing the market quarterly or annually. But often, the best insights are dynamic in nature. They appear to show shifts, sometimes unexpectedly or can indicate growth and changing behaviors as the year progresses. This is why we place a high emphasis on continuing a market analysis throughout the year.

Here, we’re looking at traffic share changes over time using Similarweb’s market trends. You can see the impact of Snychrony’s growth (in green) as they gain traction, along with USAA (purple). At the start of the year, these two players had no impact on the market. By the end of 2022, they’re showing gains and would be two key competitors to track when you reach step 4 of the market analysis process.

Those analyzing a market annually would miss out on key insights that show the rise of these two emerging players. At the end of the year, they’ve already grabbed a chunk of the market and, if they continue on the same trajectory, will continue to do so in 2023.

With the right tools, you get a dynamic view of the market data you need, allowing you to change tactics when markets shift.

Step 3 – Market trends

What: Reviewing current trends is key to any good market analysis. As we all know, trends can rise and fall at a moment’s notice. This is why this activity, in particular, is one you should routinely perform.

Why: Keeping a finger on the pulse can help you adapt and flex, at the right time, in the right way. Market trends give you insights into the current market situation and potential opportunities and challenges. Doing so can help you identify areas for growth, spot potential risks, and plan effective strategies. Market trends can also provide valuable information about customer preferences, competition, and economic and technological developments. By monitoring these trends, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and make informed decisions that will benefit their bottom line.

You may have heard about ChatGPT in the press ; this is an example of a highly-disruptive technology that has the potential to completely shift an entire market; many, in fact. It managed to gain over 1 million users within its first week on the market. And it’s a great example of why regular market trends analysis should occur.

How: There are lots of ways new market trends can surface. Consumer behavior , economic trends, technological advancements, and the competitive landscape can impact how markets behave. Legal and regulatory changes can also influence trends and changes too.

Staying up to date with industry news and legislation changes is useful. But it takes time, and it’s not always the most effective way to know when consumer sentiment changes.

Market research surveys are one way to understand customer attitudes and needs and how they shift over time. However, it’s not the most effective way to inform your market analysis. Particularly when you want real-time market intel.

Market analysis example: trend detection 

Similarweb analyzes billions of data signals daily to deliver game-changing insights about any market, region, or individual company. So, as we look at how to do market analysis, I wanted to share a practical example of how clients use Similarweb to spot trends in a market.

Wonderbly , a global business, provides personalized books, serving over 6 million customers. To grow its business, it conducts regular market analysis. As part of this process, they analyzed seasonal trending keywords within Similarweb. Let’s look at what it found out and how it impacted the business.

Wonderbly was able to spot an emerging category (anniversaries and weddings) that was not currently catered for within its own product set. In addition to being able to capitalize on seasonal trends in its market, it achieved a 69% revenue in books purchased by a more mature demographic and a completely new audience for its business.

Read more: Wonderbly’s market analysis success story .

Step 4 – Competitive analysis

What: A competitive analysis involves collecting and reviewing data about key industry players, rivals, or emerging stars in your market. It unpacks and tracks their activities and successes, letting you see what’s working, how they go to market and the various marketing strategies they use to attract and retain customers.

Why: Regardless of your size or scope, understanding the competitive landscape is key. Your target audience knows your competitors and will likely size up the pros and cons of buying from thesm before considering whether to do business with you. A robust competitive analysis can help you refine your own offerings, make informed pricing decisions, show where you can beat out your rivals, and identify areas for improvement or diversification.

How: A tried and trusted tool for this process is the well-known SWOT analysis . It lets you map and view what and how each competitor takes its products to market. Considering things like pricing, positioning, marketing, services, and more. A competitive matrix is another tool used to visualize data about rivals in a market.

To do it, download our free competitive analysis framework . Then, pick five competitors in your market to track. Complete each section, and analyze the results to discover your biggest opportunities.

Step 5 – Develop strategies

What: Use the results of your market analysis to make data-driven decisions .

Why: When you read a post about how to do market analysis, the chances are you’ve got a goal in mind. Perhaps you want to explore a new market before deciding if it’s ripe for entry. You may want to introduce a new product or service or acquire an existing company. Whatever your goal is, ensure you put the insights and data you’ve obtained to good use.

How: Create a list of potential opportunities, then build strategies around each. Here, you might evaluate potential ideas based on project costs or timeframes. Once you’ve clearly mapped out each opportunity, and understand the potential impact it will have, along with associated costs and timeframes, you can think strategically about which ideas to move forward with from both a short and long-term perspective.

Pro Tip: Use a framework to record, capture, and review the data you’ve collected about market segmentation, size, trends, and key competitors. You can draw inspiration from our downloadable competitive analysis frameworks. However, what’s key is that you systematically record your findings and review them regularly.

Step 6 – Monitor the market

What: Keep track of your market and its key players; monitor changes over time.

Why: We know markets shift, whether they’re impacted by consumer behaviors, external factors, or something else. So, it’s important to monitor changes over time.

How: We may be a little biased, but Similarweb gives you a real-time bird-eye view of your market. Letting you dive into the details and unpick changes and tactics whenever you need. With it, you can track key growth metrics, marketing channels, emerging players, trending topics , and much more.

Using the Industry Analysis tab in Similarweb Research Intelligence , I can identify the market leaders and rising stars quickly. Here, I immediately see a company to track, Synchrony . As an emerging player showing exponential growth (2700%), I’ll take my market analysis a step further by investigating their successes later.

Similarweb shows me key insights, such as website traffic , the marketing channels it’s getting traffic from, audience demographics , geography , organic search insights, and more. As part of any good market analysis, the ability to spot rising players and unpack their successes can be crucial, particularly when they’re showing such growth.

Analyzing a market: Conclusions

Learning how to do market analysis is the first step. Aside from analyzing the results and making key strategic decisions, the ability to track changes over time is key. Similarweb makes it easy to segment, size, and analyze a market fast. With it, you can spot opportunities, benchmark your performance, and monitor shifts and changes as they happen, not a month or quarter later.

What are the 4 types of market analysis?

The four types of market analysis are market segmentation, market sizing, market trends, and competitive analysis.

What are the five components of market analysis?

The five components of market analysis are: customer segmentation , customer needs and trends, competitors, market size and trend, and pricing.

What makes a good market analysis?

A good market analysis should include accurate, up-to-date data, clear objectives, and a thorough market and customer needs analysis.

Is market analysis the same as a SWOT analysis?

No, market analysis and SWOT analysis are not the same. While a SWOT analysis evaluates an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, a market analysis focuses on the external environment, such as customer needs, market trends, and competitors.

by Liz March

Digital Research Specialist

Liz March has 15 years of experience in content creation. She enjoys the outdoors, F1, and reading, and is pursuing a BSc in Environmental Science.

Related Posts

Competitive Benchmarking: Crack the Code to Your Competitors’ Success

Importance of Market Research: 9 Reasons Why It’s Crucial for Your Business

Audience Segmentation: Definition, Importance & Types

Geographic Segmentation: Definition, Pros & Cons, Examples, and More

Demographic Segmentation: The Key To Transforming Your Marketing Strategy

Unlocking Consumer Behavior: What Makes Your Customers Tick?

Wondering what similarweb can do for your business.

Give it a try or talk to our insights team — don’t worry, it’s free!

What is a Target Market and How to Find Yours?

Appinio Research · 22.09.2023 · 20min read

Have you ever wondered why some businesses seem to effortlessly connect with their customers while others struggle to make an impact? The answer lies in understanding and defining your target market . Your target market is the key to unlocking effective marketing strategies, building strong customer relationships, and achieving business success. It's not just about reaching any audience – it's about getting to the right audience.

In this guide, we'll take you on a journey to demystify the concept of a target market and provide you with the tools and insights you need to identify, understand, and resonate with the individuals most likely to embrace and value what you offer. Let's dive in and uncover the power of a well-defined target market.

What is a Target Market?

Imagine you're an artist working on a masterpiece. Before you even touch the canvas, you envision who will appreciate and connect with your artwork the most. Similarly, a target market is the specific group of people most likely to connect with and appreciate what your business offers. They are the individuals who need, want, and value your products or services the most. A target market is not just a vague idea; it's a well-defined audience you aim to reach and serve with your offerings. To put it simply, your target market is your focus, your direction, and your key to success in the world of business and marketing. Understanding your target market allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to resonate deeply with these individuals. You'll be able to craft messages that speak directly to their needs, desires, and pain points. This precision leads to more effective communication, higher conversion rates, and a stronger connection between your brand and your customers. Remember, your target market isn't set in stone; it might evolve as your business grows and changes. The process of defining and refining your target market is an ongoing one, requiring continuous research and adaptation to stay in tune with your audience's ever-changing preferences and behaviors.

The Benefits of a Well-Defined Target Market

Imagine you're planning a dinner party. You meticulously prepare a delicious spread of food, but when your guests arrive, you realize they have dietary preferences you weren't aware of. The result? A disconnect between your efforts and your guests' needs. The same principle applies to your business – without a well-defined target market, you might be offering something extraordinary, but it won't quite hit the mark for those you're trying to serve.

Here are the remarkable benefits of having a clearly defined target market:

1. Efficient Resource Utilization

Knowing who your audience is saves you time, money, and effort. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, you can focus your resources on channels and strategies most likely to reach your intended customers. This efficiency maximizes your return on investment.

2. Clearer Communication

Ever had a conversation where you felt like the other person just "gets" you? That's the magic of targeted communication. When you understand your audience's needs and speak directly to them, your messages resonate on a personal level. This builds a strong rapport and connection, fostering trust and loyalty.

3. Increased Conversion Rates

Think of your well-defined target market as a group of people already interested in your offer. By crafting your messages to address their specific pain points and desires, you're making it easy for them to say "yes." This results in higher conversion rates – turning potential customers into loyal supporters.

4. Enhanced Product Development

Creating products or services that cater to your target market's exact needs and preferences sets you up for success. You're not guessing what might work; you're providing solutions that align with their lives. This approach leads to products that sell and, more importantly, genuinely make a difference.

5. Competitive Edge

In a crowded marketplace, differentiation is critical. A well-defined target market allows you to stand out by offering something tailored to a specific group's needs. You become the go-to solution for a particular audience, and this unique positioning sets you apart from competitors who take a one-size-fits-all approach.

6. Focused Innovation

With a well-defined target market, you can concentrate your innovation efforts. Instead of trying to please everyone, you can channel your creativity and resources into innovating within the parameters of your audience's preferences and expectations.

7. Better Marketing ROI

When your marketing messages hit the right chords with your target market, you're not just getting attention – you're getting engagement. Higher engagement translates to better returns on your marketing investments, as your efforts lead to meaningful interactions and conversions.

A well-defined target market is like a compass guiding your business toward success. It transforms your strategies from generic to tailored, wasteful to efficient, and indifferent to deeply connected. By understanding who your audience is, what they need, and how to reach them, you're setting the stage for a thriving and impactful business journey.

How to Conduct Target Market Research?

When defining your target market, knowledge is power. Market research and analysis are your tools for gaining that power, enabling you to make informed decisions and create strategies that resonate deeply with your target market.

Market research lays the foundation for understanding your audience, enabling you to tailor your strategies effectively. Here's how to gather the insights you need:

Primary Research

Primary research involves gathering firsthand information directly from your potential customers. It's about engaging with real people to uncover their preferences, pain points, and aspirations:

• Surveys and Questionnaires: Craft targeted surveys to gather quantitative data on customer preferences and behaviors.
• Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews to delve into participants' experiences, opinions, and motivations.
• Focus Groups : Assemble a small group of individuals to discuss specific topics, gathering diverse perspectives.

Secondary Research

Secondary research involves leveraging existing data sources to gain a broader understanding of the market:

• Industry Reports: Access market research reports specific to your industry, often containing valuable insights into market trends and consumer behavior.
• Competitor Analysis: Study your competitors to understand their target audience, marketing strategies, and positioning.
• Online Research: Explore social media platforms, forums, blogs, and websites to uncover discussions and opinions related to your industry.

How to Create Buyer Personas?

Once you've gathered valuable insights through market research and analysis, it's time to transform raw data into relatable individuals – these are your buyer personas.

What are Buyer Personas?

Think of buyer personas as the characters in your marketing story. They're detailed, fictional representations of your ideal customers constructed from real data and insights. These personas humanize your target audience, allowing you to understand their motivations, needs, and behaviors on a personal level. By creating buyer personas, you're bridging the gap between numbers and people.

How to Develop Buyer Personas?

1. identifying pain points and challenges.

To understand your personas deeply, start by identifying the pain points and challenges they face. What keeps them up at night? What hurdles do they encounter in their daily lives? These challenges are the driving forces behind their decisions and actions.

2. Mapping Customer Journeys

Step into your persona's shoes and map out their customer journey. This journey encompasses their interactions with your brand from initial awareness to making a purchase and beyond. This mapping helps you pinpoint touchpoints where your marketing messages can make the most impact.

3. Gathering Feedback and Insights

While data forms the foundation, direct feedback from your customers is invaluable. Engage with your audience through surveys, interviews, and social media interactions. Listen to their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions – these insights offer a real-world perspective that complements quantitative data.

Understanding your audience on a profound level is key to effective marketing. By employing advanced tools like Appinio for data collection, you can elevate your persona development process.

Appinio empowers you to gather real-time insights, conduct in-depth surveys, and tap into the pulse of your target audience effortlessly. By incorporating Appinio into your strategy, you can refine your buyer personas with precision, ensuring your messaging hits the mark every time.

Book a demo today and witness how Appinio can revolutionize your data collection , taking your marketing efforts to new heights!

Book a Demo

By developing detailed buyer personas, you're breathing life into your target market. Each persona becomes a multi-dimensional character with unique traits, desires, and journeys. With these personas by your side, you'll be able to craft messages that resonate profoundly, guiding your marketing efforts toward delivering exceptional value to each persona.

How to Define Your Target Market?

Defining your target market is like embarking on a quest to uncover the treasure trove of individuals who are the best fit for your products or services. It's not a one-size-fits-all process but rather a strategic and insightful exploration.

Let's break down the steps to help you navigate this journey effectively:

1. Gather Market Research

Market research is the compass that guides you on your target market discovery. Here's how to gather the essential data:

• Primary Research: Engage directly with potential customers through surveys , interviews, and focus groups . Ask questions that uncover their needs, preferences, and pain points.
• Secondary Research: Dive into existing resources like industry reports, competitor analyses, and online forums to glean insights into market trends and customer behaviors.

2. Analyze Demographics

Demographics provide the basic framework for understanding your audience. Consider these factors:

• Age and Gender: What age group and gender are your ideal customers? Different age ranges and genders often have varying preferences and needs.
• Income and Occupation: Understanding your audience's financial capabilities and professional backgrounds helps tailor pricing and messaging.
• Education: Education level influences how customers respond to information and the sophistication of their needs.

3. Explore Psychographics

Psychographics delve into the deeper layers of your audience's personalities and lifestyles:

Interests and Hobbies: What do your potential customers enjoy doing in their free time? What are their hobbies and interests?

• Values and Beliefs: What matters most to them? Understanding their values helps you align your brand's messaging and values with theirs.
• Lifestyle Choices: Lifestyle choices, such as health consciousness or eco-friendliness, can significantly impact purchasing decisions.

4. Understand Behaviors

Analyzing consumer behavior is like deciphering the secret code of their decision-making process:

• Purchase Patterns: Do they make impulse purchases or carefully research before buying? Understanding this can shape your sales strategies.
• Brand Loyalty: Are they fiercely loyal to specific brands or open to trying new ones? This impacts how you position your offerings in the market.
• Online Behavior: How do they use the internet? Are they active on social media, or do they prefer email communication?

5. Consider Geography

Geographic segmentation is essential, especially for businesses with physical locations or those catering to specific regions:

• Location: Where are your potential customers located? This influences shipping costs, cultural preferences, and local trends.
• Climate and Environment: Climate and local environment can affect product preferences and needs (e.g., cold weather gear, beach accessories).

6. Create Buyer Personas

Compile all your collected data to create detailed and relatable buyer personas. These are fictional characters representing different segments of your target market:

• Name and Background: Give each persona a name, age, profession, and even a backstory to humanize them.
• Goals and Challenges: Define their aspirations and the obstacles they face that your product or service can address.
• Buying Behavior: Describe how they shop, where they look for information and their decision-making process.

7. Validate and Refine

Your initial target market definition might need some fine-tuning. Test your assumptions through A/B testing, customer feedback, and ongoing research. As your business evolves, so might your target market.

Remember, defining your target market isn't just about identifying who your customers are – it's about understanding them deeply. It's about empathizing with their desires and pain points and creating a bond beyond transactions. When you truly understand your target market, you can tailor your marketing efforts in ways that resonate authentically and yield exceptional results.

Competition Analysis

In the bustling marketplace, understanding your competitors is akin to learning the lay of the land. Competition analysis allows you to identify opportunities, learn from industry leaders, and carve out a unique space for your business.

1. Identify Competitors

Start by identifying who your competitors are. These are businesses that offer products or services similar to yours and are vying for the attention of the same or similar target audience. Whether they're direct competitors offering identical solutions or indirect competitors providing alternatives, understanding their presence is crucial.

2. Analyze Competitors' Target Markets

Now that you know who your competitors are, it's time to delve deeper into their target markets. Study their audience segments, demographic profiles, and psychographic insights. This analysis helps you understand who they're speaking to, what resonates with their audience, and why their offerings are appealing.

3. Differentiate Your Target Market

While studying your competitors' target markets is valuable, it's equally important to differentiate your own target market. Your goal is not to mimic your competitors but to stand out in the crowd. Here's how:

• Niche Focus: Find a unique niche within your industry that's underserved or overlooked. Cater specifically to this niche.
• Unmet Needs: Identify pain points and needs your competitors are not addressing effectively and tailor your offerings accordingly.
• Distinct Value Proposition: Develop a value proposition that speaks directly to your target market's unique requirements and desires.
• Personalization: Craft personalized messages and experiences that resonate deeply with your audience's preferences and aspirations.

By analyzing competitors and differentiating your target market, you're not only gaining insights into the competitive landscape but also building a foundation for a strategy that resonates authentically with your unique audience. This process enables you to craft a compelling narrative that captures the hearts and minds of your customers, setting you apart in the market.

How to Refine Your Target Market Strategy?

You've done the groundwork of understanding your target market, creating buyer personas, and identifying segments that align with your offerings. But remember, a target market strategy isn't a static blueprint – it's a living, breathing plan that requires ongoing nurturing and refinement.

Let's explore how to fine-tune your strategy to achieve lasting success.

1. Monitor and Measure Success

To refine your target market strategy effectively, you need a clear view of how well it's performing. This involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your goals:

• Conversion Rates: Measure how effectively your marketing efforts turn potential customers into actual buyers.
• Customer Engagement: Monitor interactions like likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates on your content.
• Customer Feedback: Pay attention to what your customers are saying through surveys, reviews, and direct feedback.
• Sales Metrics: Keep a close eye on sales data, including revenue, average transaction value, and repeat purchases.
• Website Analytics: Understand website traffic, bounce rates, and conversion paths to identify areas for improvement.

Remember, monitoring doesn't mean obsessively checking numbers every hour. Establish regular analysis intervals, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly, to gather meaningful insights and trends.

2. Adapt to Changing Market Conditions

The business world is dynamic, and your target market is no exception. Trends shift, preferences change, and new competitors emerge. Adapting to these changes is crucial to maintaining relevance and resonance:

• Stay Current: Continuously gather market intelligence through competitor analysis, industry reports, and customer surveys.
• Flexibility: Be willing to pivot your strategies if you notice shifts in customer behavior or emerging opportunities.
• Embrace Innovation: Embrace new technologies, communication platforms, and marketing methods that resonate with your evolving audience.

3. Scale Your Target Market Strategy

As your business grows, you might explore reaching new segments while nurturing your core audience. That's when the need for target market expansion arises.

• New Segments: Conduct fresh market research to identify additional segments that align with your offerings.
• Localized Strategies: If expanding geographically, tailor your strategies to suit the unique needs of different regions.
• Product Diversification: Consider offering new products or services that cater to a broader range of needs within your target market.

4. Foster Customer Relationships

Your target market strategy isn't just about acquiring customers; it's about nurturing lasting relationships. Engage with your customers beyond transactions:

• Personalization: Continue delivering personalized experiences catering to their preferences and needs.
• Communication: Maintain open lines of communication through social media, email, and other relevant channels.
• Customer Support: Provide excellent customer service, addressing concerns promptly and professionally.

5. Stay Passionate and Curious

Lastly, remain passionate and curious about your target market. Your fascination with understanding your audience's evolving desires will lead to innovative ideas and strategies. Keep learning, exploring, and engaging – your enthusiasm will reflect in your business's growth.

Remember, refining your target market strategy is a journey, not a destination. It's a commitment to staying attuned to your audience's needs and the broader market landscape. By embracing change, scaling wisely, nurturing relationships, and staying curious, you'll be well-equipped to evolve alongside your target market, ensuring your business's lasting success.

Knowing your target market is like having a secret map that leads you straight to success. It's about understanding the people who want what you're offering and tailoring your messages to speak directly to them.

By defining your target market, you're not just reaching customers – you're building connections, solving problems, and creating lasting relationships. Remember, the journey doesn't end here; it's a continuous exploration that allows you to adapt, grow, and thrive in a dynamic marketplace.

How to Identify Your Target Market in Minutes?

Imagine a world where understanding your target market is not a tedious ordeal, but an exhilarating adventure. Enter Appinio , a real-time market research platform that transforms the way you connect with consumers. With Appinio, you're not just accessing data – you're unlocking the power to make swift, informed decisions that drive your business forward.

• Real-Time Insights: Say goodbye to waiting for weeks to get your hands on valuable insights. Appinio offers lightning-fast consumer data that empowers you to react and adapt instantly.
• User-Friendly Experience: No research expertise required! Appinio handles the complexities of research and technology, leaving you with a seamless and intuitive interface to explore and extract insights.
• Unleash Your Potential: Market research no longer belongs to the realm of boredom and intimidation. Appinio brings excitement to the table, making data-driven decision-making an exhilarating part of your everyday business journey.

Get free access to the platform!

Join the loop 💌

Be the first to hear about new updates, product news, and data insights. We'll send it all straight to your inbox.

Get the latest market research news straight to your inbox! 💌

Wait, there's more

16.09.2024 | 9min read

Creative Checkup – Optimize Advertising Slogans & Creatives for ROI

03.09.2024 | 5min read

Get your brand Holiday Ready: 4 Essential Steps to Smash your Q4

03.09.2024 | 8min read

Beyond Demographics: Psychographics power in target group identification

Small Business Trends

What is a target market and how to pick one (examples and template included).

Table of Contents

What is Target Marketing?

How to define your target market, 1. conduct market research, 2. define your unique selling proposition (usp), 3. analyze your competition, 4. segment your market, 5. determine personas, 6. refine your strategy, defining your target market template, target market template:, why knowing your target market is so important for your marketing strategy, target market segmentation, psychographic segmentation, demographic segmentation, geographic target market, firmographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, types of target markets, niche markets, how big should a target market be, target market examples, starbucks target market, nike target market, tesla target market, disney target market.

Target Marketing Strategies

What is a target market?

Can you have multiple target markets, how do i answer the question ‘what is your target market’, what are the 3 common target markets, how detailed should a target market be what is the purpose of a target market, what is the difference between target market and target audience.

10 Simple ways to research your target market

• Marketing Planning
• Marketing Strategy
• market research
• target market

Researching your target market is probably the most important thing you can do when you start your service-based small business.

You need to understand what their biggest pain points and struggles are.

You need to understand what they want and need from you and your business.

And, you need to understand where they are so that you can reach them and engage.

However, you may be wondering where to start and what actions you can take to research your target market?

Well, here are ten simple ways you can conduct market research for your service-based small business:

1. study your competition.

Your competition has been there before you and has likely already done target market research which you can learn from.

Visit the websites and social media profiles of 3 – 5 of your competitors and take special note of:

• The words they use to describe their ideal clients
• The client pain points they’ve identified and mention in their copy
• The client testimonials and the success stories their clients define
• The service packages and pricing they have on offer

Once you start collecting this information, you’ll likely see patterns amongst your competition.

Are they all targeting the same type of client, or are there any gaps you could take advantage of?

Do your competitors talk about the same pain points? If they do, it’s likely a clue that this is the most significant pain point that your client has.

Also, finally are there standard results that your competitor’s clients talk about in their testimonials, which could indicate what’s most important to them?

Remember, studying your competition is not about copying what they do, but rather to give you some insight as to what’s already working in your marketplace.

2. Interview your target market

Conducting target market research interviews must be one of the most effective ways to uncover all you need to know about your ideal clients.

However, many new small business owners find this difficult as they don’t have an existing pool of clients whom they can talk to.

If you have a new business, don’t let this stop you. There are many ways to conduct interviews.

You could ask family and friends if they know of anyone who fits your target market profile whom they could introduce you to.

You could answer queries, be helpful, and reach out to potential clients in Facebook groups online.

You could also join a networking group or attend networking events where you know your target market will be.

RELATED: How to build a network: The ultimate small business networking guide

It’s surprising how many people struggle to ask for help; however unless you start reaching out to people and engaging in conversation you won’t understand what it is that your ideal clients are seeking.

3. Join online groups and forums

As mentioned above, online Facebook groups and forums such as Quora and Trip Advisor (if you’re a travel business) are great places to conduct target market research.

This is because these groups are where people ask many questions.

When you see the same questions repeatedly, it’s a pretty good indication that there is a need for someone to solve this problem.

If you’re going to use this strategy, be sure to join groups or forums where you know your target market will be (not your peers).

Also, to save time, use the search box in the online group or forum to narrow in on the questions related to your niche.

4. Search for case studies and statistics

It’s essential to research case studies and statistics when researching your target market because it will help you to ‘size’ your market.

When you have some idea about the size of your target market, you’ll be able to determine whether it’s large enough for you to see a sustainable return and be profitable.

Alternatively, you may find that there is a segment of your market, which is more significant than another, which may point to an opportunity to niche your business down further.

To find case studies and statistics, visit government websites that track the census or key statistics for your country and region.

Also, try visiting your local library or business chamber or council who may also have statistics relevant to your local area.

Finally, you can also find this type of information by simply typing the words case study or statistics after the name of your niche into Google.

Not sure where to start when it comes to finding your first clients?  That’s where I can help. Get started today by clicking the button below to take my quiz – What’s Stopping You From Finding Your First Clients – and let’s discover what’s been holding you back:

5. Analyse your social media insights

If you’ve built up a bit of a following online already, then you will have valuable data about your target market that you can analyse.

Your social media platforms all have insights dashboards which you can view.

If you have a Facebook page, you may also want to review the audience insights on your Facebook business account to get a profile of the people who are following you. (You will need to build up an audience first before this works).

Also, don’t forget to set up and review Google Analytics on your website.

Google Analytics will give you insights around your target market, including where your website visitors live and the platforms they are on before they visit your site.

6. Create a Facebook group

One of the benefits of creating a closed Facebook group is that you can collect information about your followers when they join.

When you set up your group, add up to three questions to collect the information you want to know.

Examples of the questions you could ask to help you build your target market profile include:

• How long have you been in business?
• What industry do you work in?
• What’s your favourite XYZ (related to your niche)?
• What’s your biggest pain point when it comes to (your services)?
• What’s most important to you when it comes to (your services)?
• What do you need help with the most right now?

In addition to asking these types of questions to get information, you can also see from their Facebook profile where they are from if they have filled in their location details.

Also, with a Facebook group, you can run polls in the group to get feedback and information directly from your target market.

All this information combined will help you to determine what types of followers you are attracting and validate whether you’re talking about the right kinds of pain points.

Have you joined the My Client Strategy Facebook group yet? We’d love to have you join us!

7. Send a survey to your email list

Again, if you have a bit of a following, already there is an option to send an online survey to your email list.

I use Survey Monkey to conduct my marketing research, and it’s free for up to 10 questions.

Also, Survey Monkey has several pre-formatted questions making the research process more straightforward and a reporting tool to collate your results.

To increase your response rate, you could also try running a competition or incentive to get more of your email list to complete the survey.

RELATED: How to build an email list when you’re first starting out

8. Set up a test group of potential clients

This target market research method is excellent for when you want to launch a new service.

Ask past clients or others you know who fit the profile if they would be willing to attend a feedback session.

Present the new service offering you are planning to launch and ask for direct feedback from your target market.

Not only will you understand what level of interest may be out there, but you’ll also find out what your target market finds the most valuable in your offering.

This research and feedback will help you to create marketing messages that are more likely to resonate and cut through with your ideal clients.

9. Use search engine keyword tools

If you’re trying to work out what words might resonate better with your target market, then use an SEO keyword research tool to help give you the answer.

These tools will also help you to work out what your target market may be more likely to search for when it comes to your services.

One of my favourite SEO keyword tools is Keywords Everywhere .

It’s a low-cost Google Chrome extension that tells you how many times specific keywords and keyword phrases are used on Google on average, and the level of competition online for those words.

The results appear directly in the Google search engine, and you can save them to come back to and review later.

RELATED: How to choose the right keywords for your target market

10. Network at conferences and events

It’s incredible what insight and ideas you can get from directly speaking to people who fit your target market profile.

Which is why it’s vital to regularly attend industry conferences and events where you know your target market will also be.

Before you go, make sure that you’ve worked out a bit of a plan for the type of information you’re looking for.

If you’ve thought about it beforehand, you’ll be more conscious to ask the right kind of questions.

While at these events, it can also be a good idea to ask the people you meet what other events and conferences they are thinking about attending.

It can be hard to find the right events and conferences sometimes, so asking around can help you to speed up the search and ensure you’re attending worthwhile events.

So, there you have it. Ten simple ways to research your target market. What methods are you going to use? Please share with us in the comments below.

Not sure where to start when it comes to finding your first clients?

What you need is a  solid sales and marketing foundation  that will give you the confidence and motivation to show up consistently and attract the ideal clients you’ve been looking for. And that’s where I can help.

In my 12-week 1:1 coaching program, Find Your First Clients , you’ll be guided step-by-step through my  Foundations First Framework , so you can stop spinning around in circles and gain the clarity you need to  stand out, find your first clients, and start making money in your service business  – even if you don’t feel *ready* for clients yet.

With the right strategic foundations, you can stop feeling invisible and start standing out, so you can find clients and make sales in your service business sooner.

Click the button below to find out more…

Did you find this post helpful? Please don’t forget to PIN to Pinterest or share on Facebook.

Hayley Robertson

Related posts.

Finding Your Brand Voice: 7 Branding Tips for Small Businesses

7 Things an effective marketing message must have

The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Guide for Service Businesses

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Marketing Research Basics: Identifying Your Target Market

Mapping your demographics will help you spend your marketing budget wisely.

There are three areas that you should research:

• your target market (customers)
• your competition
• the industry

This article will discuss the basics for performing target market research.

Who Are You Marketing To?

"Everyone" is not your target market! Knowing and understanding your target market is crucial. The benefits of knowing your target market include:

• knowing who and where your customers are
• knowing how you can communicate with them and
• helping you to choose effective marketing channels

You want to spend your marketing budget wisely. By knowing and understanding your target market, you can focus your spending on the customers who will become repeat purchasers. In the long run, this will be more effective than continually marketing to those who either won't purchase or who are destined to only purchase once. Market research allows you to drill down from "everyone" to smaller groups that you will focus on. Not all customers are the same - look for niches. By identifying which traits are prevalent among those who want to purchase your product or service, you can then focus on promoting to that group, which would be your target market.

Division of the total market into smaller, relatively homogeneous groups is a process called market segmentation. Market segmentation is very important because no single marketing mix (combination of product, price, promotion, and place) can satisfy everyone. Therefore, separate marketing strategies, that is, separate marketing mixes developed from your research, should be used for different market segments.

• An effective segmentation must meet the following basic requirements:
• Market segments must be measurable in terms of both purchasing power and size.
• You must be able to effectively communicate with and serve a market segment.
• Market segments must be sufficiently large enough to be potentially profitable.
• Market segments must not change too quickly.

Commonly used segmentation factors are demographics, geographics, psychographics, and behaviors, but any segmentation is possible. To begin defining your target market, answer the following questions.

Who are the people that make up your target market?

This is demographic segmentation. Demographics are used to classify groups of people based on common characteristics. Typical demographic categories are:

• Occupation/employment status
• Family status

Some resources for collecting demographic information include the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census data.

Where are these people located?

This is geographic segmentation. Most business owners develop a target market within a specific geographical location. For some, tools like the Internet allow them to expand beyond a well-defined geographic market. In any event, answering the next questions will allow you to think carefully about where your targeted consumers are located.

• In what area (country, state, city, etc.) do they live?
• Do they live in a rural, urban, or suburban setting?
• What is the population density and growth rate where your target market lives?

What do they think?

This is psychographic segmentation. Psychographics are the values of customers and what motivates them to purchase your products. Knowing this can help you craft marketing messages for that group. For instance, knowing that your target customers value environmentally-friendly packaging indicates that you may be able to sell more of your product if you package it in that way. Likewise, knowing that your audience participates in certain types of activities - outdoor recreation, for example - can help you target a trail riding service appropriately. In general, psychographics can be evaluated by answering these general questions:

• What are the consumers' opinions and values?
• What are their interests and lifestyles?
• What attitudes do they have about your product?
• What needs do they have that compel them to purchase your product?

What do they do that makes them unique (as a group) from others?

This is behavioral segmentation. Think about their actual behavior in the marketplace. If you can learn about the products they buy, how frequently they purchase them, and other key issues, you'll be better able to provide the most attractive product/service for your audience. The questions you'll need to address in this category are:

• What products do they typically use?
• What benefits do they look to get from the products they purchase?
• How often do they use them?
• How sensitive are they to price changes?
• How loyal are they to their preferred brands?
• How are the products usually purchased and from where?

As part of the research process, you may find it helpful to develop one or more "customer profiles." A customer profile is a general description of the type of individual that makes up your target market. Let's look at an example to illustrate. Consider an agritourism operation that consists of an on-farm market, corn maze, pumpkin patch, apple picking, baby farm animal petting area, and hard-cider tasting room. Through the market research process, you identify a customer profile as shown below.

Demographics

• Age: early 30's
• Single father
• Early career professional
• Lower-middle-income
• Takes a child on weekend outings
• Spends money on ensuring a child has a good time
• Uses social media to look for activities

Psychographics

• Values healthy foods
• Wants outdoor activities

Geographics

• Doesn't want to drive more than 45 minutes from home

Knowing who you will market and sell your product(s) to is vital to developing an effective marketing strategy for your farm business. Before a marketing strategy can be developed and implemented you must identify, evaluate, and select a target market. Recall that while a market is a group with sufficient purchasing power and willingness to buy, your target market(s) is specific segment(s) of the market most likely to purchase your product.

As part of the market research and segmentation process, you may find it helpful to develop customer profiles as a way to describe the "typical" member of a target market group. Remember, though, that you are describing general traits about this targeted group. Other individuals and groups, those outside your target market, may also purchase your product.

• Value-added agriculture
• Agricultural entrepreneurship
• Value-added dairy entrepreneurship
• Value-added dairy foods marketing
• Online marketing and sales
• Social media
• Direct marketing
• Farm and ag business management
• Business planning

You may also be interested in ...

Food for Profit

Retail Farm Market School

Beef Feeding Operation

Food Trends 2023

Developing a Roadside Farm Market

Understanding Pricing Objectives and Strategies for the Value-Added Ag Producer

Cucumber Production

Producción de Brócoli

Producción de Maíz Dulce

Marketing to Professional Chefs

Personalize your experience with penn state extension and stay informed of the latest in agriculture..

Target Market Research for the Professional Services

Researching your target markets is one of the smartest business moves you can make. Professional services firms that do frequent research on their target clients grow 3X faster and are more profitable than firms that do not.  That is a tremendous advantage in today’s competitive marketplace.

In this post we will explain what target market research is, provide examples, and show you how to go about conducting, analyzing and applying it. Our focus will be on the professional services, but the principals apply more broadly to B2B marketing.

Let’s start by defining what we mean by a target market.

Target Market Defined

A target market is a group of potential clients that you wish to sell your services to. They are typically a specific segment of a larger market that could potentially use your services. The target is often selected because the firm has a particular competitive advantage with that segment (such as the ability to deliver superior value or a higher level of demand for your services) or the segment has a higher growth rate.

Target Market Research Defined

Target market research is the process of systematically collecting and analyzing information about your target market. The primary purpose of the research is to better understand your target audience to shape your service offerings, pricing, marketing, and business development. Selected portions of such research are also frequently used as high value content within marketing campaigns.

Target Market Examples

A consulting firm that helps client set-up the financial management systems could offer their services to almost any business. Because of their accumulated experience with various manufacturers they may choose to designate manufactures of all types as their preliminary target market.

Now let’s assume they did target market research on manufacturers and learned that firms with 50-200 employees has a high level of interest in their services and the ability to afford them. This segment of the market became their new target market as it offers the highest probability of success.

Let’s take another example, this time of a firm with multiple target markets. A software company develops project management software that is useful to any project-based organizations. Their analysis of their target market research reveals that both consulting firms and engineering firms are good target markets for their software.

They may continue their research and analysis and learn that within the consulting firm market, the mid-sized firms are the best market segment for their offerings. Within the engineering market the segments may be very different. In this case firms working on small project are most responsive to their pricing model. So, in one market (consulting firms) you are segmented by size of your target clients. In the other target market (engineering firms) you are segmented by the type of projects they work on.

How To Identify Your Target Markets

Many professional service firms are challenged by the prospect of identifying their target markets. There are at least a couple of reasons for this. First, many professional services are applicable to a wide variety of organizations. For example, almost every organization keeps some sort of financial records and needs to file taxes. How do you select which organizations to target for your services?

The second reason selecting target markets is such a challenge is our natural instinct. As humans we are reluctant to exclude potential clients. We are afraid of “losing” a sale, so we try to be everything to everyone. In reality, targeting everyone means you are actually targeting no one. Trying to be everything to everyone means you are nothing special to anyone.

So how can you get past there barriers to identify your best target markets?

Let’s start with the scenario where you already have a group of clients. Ask yourself this question.

What are the types of clients that we want more of?

This is often the easiest way to see where you are delivering the best value to clients who are well matched with your firm. Are there many options? If there are, you need to dig deeper to decide which markets to target.

Here are some key questions to ask yourself to select among potential target markets. These questions also fit the scenario where you are introducing a new product or service.

Where can we deliver the most value? Perhaps your processes work best in organizations of a certain size or level of sophistication.

Where do we have a competitive advantage? For example, you may have noteworthy experience or a very high-profile client in a specific market segment. How strong is your brand in each of the potential target markets? Can you differentiate your firm from competitors?

Is the market large enough to support our needs? Are there enough organizations who fit my target profile to sustain and grow my business? Do we have what it takes to win enough of the business?

What is the competitive environment like? Are there many alternatives to our firm? Are the competitors stronger, with higher visibility? Are new competitors emerging? Are prices falling?

Some of these questions may be easily answered. Others will require some target market research. Let’s take a look at what that involves.

Watch our on-demand webinar: How B2B Research Can Supercharge Your Content Strategy

How To Research Your Target Markets

There are three basic approaches to research your target markets. We’ll overview each of them in turn. For a more in-depth discussion of research options and strategies we recommend Hinge’s guide to professional services research .

1. Analyze your direct experience.

Often overlooked as a source of insight and understanding, this is a great place to start. In most professional services organizations, you and your colleagues have accumulated much experience with your target audiences (unless it is a totally new target, of course).

When an individual within your firm expresses an opinion about your targets it is often anecdotal and of limited value. However, if that same experience is systematically accumulated over many people, it begins to assume more value. For example, you might survey all client facing professionals about what issues target clients bring up to them.

You may also have access to valuable financial or operational experience available through your financial management system. Here you might learn about average project size or payment histories. Perhaps your CRM system can inform you on time to close or closing percentage.

While there is great value in this type of direct operational experience, there are also limitations. It only represents a limited sample of the market and reflects what you have done in the past and not what is possible or preferred by the target audience.

Even with these limitations, it is a great place to start and gives you many hypothesis or research questions to explore.

2. Secondary research.

This approach involves exploring research that others have already done on your target markets. A great place to start is to search online for studies that have already been published by industry trade associations, government agencies, or private firms. These days there is a rich mix of free and paid sources that cover many major industries and important topics. There are also analysts’ reports and many industry growth projections.

And of course, you can use many online sources to research individual target clients or competitors. Rating sites and social media excel in this area.

These secondary sources are great for assessing overall industry grow or identifying key issues facing their respective industries. Where they fall short is that they may not single out the industry segment that you are targeting or the questions you really want answered. That is where primary research really shines.  

3. Primary research.

With primary research you are determining exactly which segment you are researching and what specific information you are looking for. In this regard you are getting direct answers to you most important questions from your exact target market.

In most cases primary research is done by an outside independent firm (Full disclosure, Hinge does a lot of this research for our clients ). This is very important for getting accurate and unbiased responses to your questions. And if the firm doing the research has a lot of experience with your industry they can help you put your results in context.

Primary research can be done using structured interviews, focus groups, or surveys. In most cases, focus groups are not well suited for professional services firms because of confidentiality issues. Most executives are not forthcoming in a group of direct competitors! Individual interviews and surveys each have their strengths and limitations .

Primary research is well suited to finding out how your firm is viewed by your target market and the best approaches for messaging and marketing to your prime targets. It is perhaps the most direct way to reduce marketing risk. Of course, that value comes at a price.

What Questions Should You Ask of Your Target Markets?

Beyond the basic growth and demographics of your target market, there is no single set of questions that is right for every target market research study. Your specific situation will ultimately dictate what information is most important to your success.

Having said that, we have identified some questions that are broadly applicable to most situations . Here are some of our favorites.

• What are your target clients’ top priorities and business issues?
• How do you fit in?
• How is your firm perceived in the marketplace?
• Who are your true competitors?
• How do you compare?
• How do your best prospects search for a firm like yours?
• What are they most interested in?
• What turns them off?
• What tips the scale?
• How well does your firm deliver on its promises?
• What do your existing target clients’ value most about your firm?
• How loyal are your current target clients likely to be?
• What is your potential for more referrals?
• What other services do your current target clients want you to offer?

By the time that you have completed all your research you will have a broad array of facts and insights to draw upon for your analysis.

Research as Content

There is another use of target market research that bears consideration. Use research as high value premium content  in your marketing campaigns. The very same research can also serve this second critical marketing function. There are two primary reasons why research makes such powerful thought leadership content.

First, the results of original research are often of intense interest to the very executives you’re targeting. People are appropriately curious about what their peers and competitors are doing. What’s working in their industry? How are other companies dealing with automation or talent shortages? You are likely to attract the attention of the right targets if the research is relevant to their concerns.

Second, research is seen as being the most credible and trusted source of knowledge. As such it helps to overcome the trust barrier that is so central to professional services marketing. When you combine trust and relevance you get an incredibly powerful marketing lever to establish  thought leadership .

Let’s look at an example of how research as premium content works in real life. Let’s say you conduct an original study that informs you about your prospects use of social media for work. First you will gain the insight which will help you target your social media marketing. That is a valuable win in its own right.

People are also curious about what their competitors are up to, so the research is relevant and attracts their attention. And because you have shared the research you are seen as knowledgeable and helpful.

This powerful combination makes original research one of the most effective type of premium content to use in your content marketing campaign. It demonstrates to your best prospects that you “know their industry” and have relevant expertise.

Target Market Analysis

A Target Market Analysis is the process of compiling, reviewing and analyzing the research and information you have collected about your target market for the purpose of identifying which segments of the overall market are likely to be your best clients and how to best reach them.

This process typically starts by organizing and reviewing the data you have collected. What are the important dimensions that characterize the target market? What makes one prospect more desirable than another?

Consider demographic variables, such as size or location. Does your firm do better with very large clients or mid-sized? Are new firms more likely to need your services or more established players? Are firms located in one region very different than those in another location?

Also consider behavioral and psychographic variables as well. Sometimes the most powerful variables are not demographics, but the “softer” considerations such as attitudes or opinions. For example, at Hinge we have determined that our best target clients are those professional services firms that appreciate research and science-based approaches to marketing. They may be small or large or from any part of the world.

A word of caution is in order. It’s easy to get confused here. Sometimes a variable defines your target market. For example, you might target a specific industry. In this case other variables such as firm size (small vs. large) might be a segment. In another situation you might define your target as a certain size of firm (e.g. enterprise scale organizations) in which case the industry they are in (e.g. hospitality vs. manufacturing) might be how you segment your target market.

Remember, your goal here is to determine which segments of your market are your best targets. This allows you to prioritize your marketing efforts for maximum results with the minimum effort and expenditure of resources.

Target Market Segmentation

Target market segmentation is the process of dividing a large target market into smaller segments that reflect meaningful differences between the segments in their responsiveness to various service offerings or marketing messages. The purpose of such segmentation is to make marketing more effective and efficient by tailoring your marketing efforts to the differing needs and preferences of the different segments.

There are four common ways to segment a large target market.

• Geographic. This is perhaps the most common form of segmentation in professional services firms. Each office targets the firms headquartered in its local market. It may still make sense in some situations but increasingly location related segmentation is getting harder. Why? Consumer shift to online interactions are weakening the need to be local. Many firms identify more with the industry they are in rather than their location.
• Demographic. In the consumer world demographics refer to variables such as gender, age, income and the like. In the B2B professional services world you are more likely referring to characteristics of a company such as industry, firm size, revenue or years in business. If you are targeting a specific role in target firms, such as the CEO, you may also use traditional demographics as well as firm level variables. These are also very widely used ways to segment a target market. Industry and firm size are perhaps the most commonly used variables as they have profound effects on target market needs and desired services.
• Behavioral. Behavioral indicators refer to actions that firms in your target audience may or may not take. Frequent users of a service may well represent a different segment than those clients who use your service rarely. You may want to target those high-volume users for special attention. Similarly, a prospect who regularly downloads content on a specific topic could be segmented for special messaging or more aggressive follow-up.
• Psychographic. Psychographic variables are often described as softer attributes. Common examples are personality type, attitudes, opinions, lifestyle choices and motivations. While these can be very powerful segmentation variables there are some downsides. They are notoriously difficult to reliably measure. They are not always apparent or easily determined. Further, there can be a range of patterns in a single organization limiting their usefulness in B2B market segmentation.

As we mentioned above, segmentation happens during the target market analysis process. As you consider possible variables to use in segmentation, ask yourself these two related questions.

Does it really impact their value as a client ?

Many differences don’t really have much of an impact.

Can you determine it in advance?

If the answer is no, it becomes difficult to use it in your marketing program.

Using these two questions you can quickly home in on a few possible segments so they can be more fully evaluated. Target market segmentation can have a big impact on marketing effectiveness and efficiency once you get the segments right. Shoot for enough segments to match the market realities, but few enough to be practical for implementation.

A Final Thought

Target market research can have a profound effect on your firm’s growth and profitability. It helps you gain a deeper understanding of your markets and identify the most profitable segments to target and the most effective and efficient ways to do so. It can even be used as high-value content to attract your prime targets. This is a lesson that the fastest growing and most profitable firms have already learned.

Free Resource

The Professional Services Guide to Research

Additional Resources

• Professional services firms that conduct regular research on their target audience grow up to 10X faster and are almost 2X more profitable than firms that don’t. But what kinds of research are best? And how, exactly, does it drive growth and profits? The easy-to-read Guide to Professional Services Research will teach you everything you need to know to get started.
• Learn the marketing strategies of high-growth firms. Master the skills. We created Hinge University to teach busy professionals the strategies and skills used by the fastest-growing firms.

RELATED POSTS

Most Popular Posts

• A Game-Changing Business Development Strategy to Achieve Consistent Growth
• Brand Development Strategy: 10 Essential Steps for Your Professional Services Firm
• How to Master Strategic Marketing for Professional Services Firms
• Digital Branding for Professional Services
• 10 Essential B2B Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Professional Services Firm
• Digital Marketing Strategy for Professional Services
• Proven Rebranding Strategies for Your Professional Services Firm
• Elements of a Successful Brand 1: Brand Positioning
• The Top 5 Business Challenges for Accounting & Financial Services Firms
• Top 21 Examples of Key Differentiators for Professional Services Firms
• Elements of a Successful Brand 4: Brand Promise
• What Is the Cost of Video Production for the Web?

Send me all articles:

• Pollfish School
• Market Research
• Survey Guides
• Get started

How to Reach the Correct Target Market Sample to Understand Your Customers

A target market sample to market research is what a target market is to a business: of critical importance. This is because market researchers must conduct research on the correct sample of the population.

When it comes to business, this sample is largely made up of a business’s target market, i.e., the segment of the population most likely to buy from the business. In order to build effective survey studies and perform valuable market research, you need to specifically examine the target market sample.

Finding this sample can be difficult, let alone contacting it. This article explains the concept of the target market sample, including how to properly determine its members and reach out to them for your market research needs.

Defining a Target Market Sample

A target market sample is a kind of market research sample ; this concept denotes a group of people who participate in your study , representing an entire targeted population .  

A target market sample is a specific kind of market research sample . As its name implies, it is a sample that represents your target market, as it is made of the people in your target market . If you do not know how to identify your target market, conducting market research is the best way to accurately determine it. 

In particular, effective survey studies can help you determine the members of this group. You can further divide the group into specific segments by way of market segmentation . While this practice is a critical subset in marketing, it too can be conducted via market research, including survey research as a primary method.

A target market sample works symbiotically with market research , which is to say that one relies on the other to achieve its best performance. This is due to the fact that you need to be acquainted with this sample, as learning more about it is crucial for your market research. 

Concurrently, performing market research correctly will help you define your target market sample , allowing you to cater to this group correctly, which in turn will increase sales and profits.  

The Importance of the Target Market Sample in Market Research

As aforementioned, a target market sample and market research share a symbiotic relationship. A target market sample is critical to market research on several other grounds. First off, it is used in both probability and non-probability sampling.

These are the two major sampling sources in survey sampling methods along with other market research methods. For example, you ought to conduct studies on your target market sample during other primary research such as interviews, VoC programs and focus groups, along with secondary research like trade publications, statistics providers and verticalized websites. 

This group is not merely applicable to these forms of research; rather it is necessary. Here are several ways that prove the importance of garnering and studying your target market sample.  

• Before studying your target market, you must ensure that you are reaching the correct people. A target market sample comprises them.
• Wasted efforts are too costly and time-consuming , thus, you have to be in touch with your target market.
• You need to understand your customer base for all marketing and business endeavors.
• Understanding your target market samples assures that you reach the correct people for future research and non-research undertakings . 
• This sample allows you to form data-backed characteristics about your customer base, as you can safely vouch their representation of your target market.  
• You can build personas by reaching and studying the correct sample.
• You can perform qualitative research along with statistical research
• Having access to this sample means you will be able to make informed predictions about your target market.

Determining Your Target Market Sample

Given that one relies on the other, you must conduct market research properly and define your target market sample accurately before proceeding .

To identify your target market , you must first conduct some secondary research. Although this action is best-suited for startups and those new to the business world, long-established businesses can still benefit from this, as consumer interests change. 

For example, not too long ago, Facebook was considered a social hub for college students and the younger generation. But in the current year of 2021, 46% of older Americans use Facebook . As a matter of fact, Facebook is the most-used social media platform among seniors.

You’ll find research on your target market and some of its segments in secondary sources such as brand literature (reports, case studies, blog posts, articles), news sites (in your niche) and sites dedicated to market research. 

While secondary research is a good starting point, it does allow you to fully capture the makeup of your target market. Therefore secondary research alone is inadequate for obtaining your true target market sample. 

Instead, you must learn who comprises your target market sample via primary research. There are various market research tools available, but they are far from equivalence . 

In order to form the makeup of your target market sample, that is, before, you reach out to it for concrete marketing campaigns, you must first employ an easy-to-use tool for such a campaign, the kind that allows you to amass their key traits and preferences.

Survey research is a rescuing aid, as you can survey suspected members of your target market (based on previous secondary research) to understand them better. In such a case, you do not need to set up a strict screening portion on demographics , as you are still learning which demographics to use in your sample. 

Create these initial surveys to learn more about your suspected target population. Search for trends among ages, geographic location, ethnic groups and cultures, along with lifestyles. This will help you get a feel of who is most interested in your niche and most importantly, your product, service or experience. 

During your survey data analysis , segment your respondents based on their opinions, preferences and demographics information. You can disregard the demographics who show little to no interest in your offering.

Continue this process should you require market segmentation, to further organize your target market into smaller segments. Segmenting your customers is critical for providing personalization.

With these actions, you are able to identify who to include in your market research or survey sample.

How to Reach the Correct Target Market Sample

Secondary sources can appear to be arbitrary sources of research, whereas primary sources allow you to wield full control — at least they should, in market research. As such, you should conduct surveys to extract data from the correct target market sample.

Once you’ve identified your target market sample members via secondary and primary research, you can then safely conduct market research on them for a variety of macro-applications.

• customer development
• general marketing
• advertising, branding
• customer experience (CX)
• customer satisfaction

Start small by testing a general portion of your target market. This involves survey participants bound by common demographic categories. You do not need to delve into psychographic and behavioral traits just yet.

Instead, ask the more general population of your target market sample a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions . This will help you map out who they are beyond their general demographics. As such, this can be seen as an extension of determining your sample members, but to a far more precise degree.

When you get a better sense of your target market, you should then conduct more granular surveys to understand their needs. After this, you ought to create quantitative surveys in order to form statistical representations of your target market.

You can switch between quantitative and qualitative surveys , or conduct surveys that include a mesh of both. The more surveys you run on your target market sample, the more meticulously will you be able to define it. 

The more accurately-defined your target market sample is, the more accurate and relevant it will be for your market research . Fortifying your market research will lead you to make better business decisions. 

Satisfying to Your Customer Base

Satisfying your customer base is no easy feat. Businesses have invested long and hard into marketing. But you cannot deliver a valuable marketing campaign without understanding your target market to a T.

Thus, you need to perform continuous market research on this group of people. To do so, you must understand who constitutes your target market sample, the market research sample of your focus. A strong survey platform will help you achieve this objective.

The correct online survey platform will allow you to painlessly identify your target market sample and deploy surveys to it. After all, if you cannot reach out to your sample and extract data, then it is of no use to your business.

Thus, when you conduct market research on the members who belong in your target market sample, you will avoid useless and inaccurate research , the kind that offers no value to your company. Surveys help you ward off this risk.

Do you want to distribute your survey? Pollfish offers you access to millions of targeted consumers to get survey responses from $0.95 per complete. Launch your survey today.

Privacy Preference Center

Privacy preferences.

BUSINESS STRATEGIES

What is a target market and how to define yours

• Rebecca Strehlow
• Dec 7, 2023
• 11 min read

One of the first steps in starting a business is determining your target market. This step alone can be the basis for what products you create, how you brand your business and ultimately who you market to.

With that in mind, you’ll need to develop assets that resonate with your target market. Start by creating a business website that represents your business and uses language and visuals relatable to your audience. Consider what niche you can fit into and what separates your business from the competition. From there you can create messaging, branding and advertising designed for your target market and convert more leads into customers.

Keep reading to learn more about defining your target market and gain expert tips on how to implement this targeting throughout your business strategy.

What is a target market?

Your target market is your product’s primary consumer. Once you know who this is, you can tailor your branding and marketing efforts toward them.

A target market can be composed of a broad group, such as married men over 40 in the US, or it can be quite narrow, such as urban, health-conscious, vegetarian women in Texas. Your market will depend on the particular consumer needs your product addresses.

The three key aspects of a target market include:

Demographics: Age, gender, income, education or employment status.

Geographics: Primary location of your market.

Personality traits: What they like and dislike, as well as where they shop and their favorite brands.

To pinpoint your target market, you’ll need to analyze data about your product niche, your customers and your competitors. You'll also need to understand more about the specific types of target markets in more detail.

What are the types of target markets?

In general there are several ways business owners can categorize target markets. For the most part target markets are divided into the following four main types: demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral.

Demographic

This type of target market is defined by a number of demographic variables such as age, gender, income, education, and family size. Companies might target specific demographic groups based on their buying habits and purchasing power.

Geographic target markets are defined, as the name suggests, by geographic variables such as region, state, city and population density.

Psychographic

Psychographic variables such as lifestyle, values, personality, and social class make up the definition of this target market.

This type of target market is defined by consumer behavior, such as the benefits sought, usage rate, and customer loyalty.

It's important to note that a business may choose to target one or multiple types of target markets, depending on their specific business objectives and marketing strategies.

Why are target markets important?

Understanding your target market is a crucial aspect of developing a successful business. Below we explore the main reasons why understanding your target market is so important in order to ensure a profitable business.

Better customer segmentation : Understanding your target market allows you to segment your customers more effectively, which in turn helps you tailor your marketing messages and products to meet their specific needs and preferences.

Increased focus and efficiency: Focusing on a specific target market allows you to be more efficient with marketing resources while avoiding wasting time and money on efforts that are not likely to reach or resonate with your target audience.

Improved brand reputation: Understanding your target market can help you establish and maintain a positive brand reputation by allowing you to align your brand with the values and interests of your market.

Increased customer loyalty : By understanding your target market and delivering products and services that meet their needs and expectations, you will foster a loyal customer base that is more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Better decision making: Understanding your target market provides valuable insights that can inform important business decisions, such as product development, pricing strategies and distribution channels for marketing efforts.

Target market vs. target audience?

Often used interchangeably, target market and target audience are not the same thing. Your target market is the end consumer while your target audience is to whom your company advertises. While your target market might fall into your target audience, who you advertise to may not, in the end, be the one who consumes the product.

To clarify, let’s look at an example: Kids toys, for example, have a very clear target market: children. In addition, toys are often marketed toward children who identify with a specific gender category. Nevertheless, kids don’t purchase their toys, their parents do. So toy companies must focus their advertising strategies on parents (the target audience) to sell toys for their kids (the target market).

For example, Generation Alpha , kids born between 2010 and 2025 with millennial parents, play with much different toys than their parents did because millennials have different consumer preferences than their Baby Boomer parents. Rather than shopping in big-box stores for brightly-colored toy packages, millennial parents are more likely to purchase clean, minimalistic, and gender-inclusive toys from Instagram ads or Amazon. Therefore, toy companies are using Millennial preferences (the target audience) to sell toys to their Generation Alpha kids (the target market).

How to determine your target market

Gather consumer data

Know your product’s benefits

Investigate your competitors

Segment your audience

Write a target market statement

Refine your research

01. Gather consumer data

The first step in defining your target market is to learn more about your customers. Even if you’ve just started an online store and don’t have many customers yet, these practices will come in handy further down the line.

Start by gathering information about current and past buyers and try to identify characteristics that they have in common. This data will help you market your product to people with similar interests. If you are still in the early stages of your business and haven’t started selling your product, look at competitor markets and use that information to determine your target market.

Using website analytics tools, social media and email marketing analytics platforms, here are some data points you’ll want to consider:

Age: Do your customers share a common decade or generation? Are they millennials, older adults, or something in between?

Location: Where in the world do most of your customers live? Consider the different cities, countries, and regions.

Language: Which languages do your customers speak? Remember that your customers’ language isn’t necessarily the dominant language of their country.

Spending power: Consider socioeconomic factors that may be affecting your customers. How much money are they willing or able to spend?

Hobbies and career: What do your customers enjoy doing? What are their professions, and what do they do in their spare time?

Stage of life: Where are your customers in life? Are they college students? New parents? Retirees?

If your company is B2B rather than B2C , you’ll want to look for characteristics of companies, rather than individual consumers. These traits include:

Business size: Are the businesses that buy from you small, medium, or large?

Location: Where are these businesses physically located?

Vertical: Which industries are most of these businesses in?

Budget: How have these businesses raised money ? Consider how much they’d be willing or able to spend on products like yours.

Be sure to track this information in an orderly manner so that you can keep your findings organized and easily identify trends. Analyzing these trends will allow you to identify shared characteristics within your customer base. These characteristics will inform your inbound marketing efforts and steer your strategy toward your target audience.

02. Know your product benefits

The next step is to understand your consumers’ motivation behind purchasing your product, rather than a competitor. You can learn this information by speaking to your customers directly, asking for testimonials, and by doing in depth competitor research to understand the difference between your product and theirs.

Get to know the benefits—and not just the features—of your product or service. The features are your product’s characteristics. For example, if your business sells suitcases, you might describe your product as being small, compact and having multiple compartments. Your product’s benefits, on the other hand, are the advantages it brings to your customers. Think about how your product makes someone’s life better or easier. The compact, multi-compartment suitcase offers the benefits of being easy to carry and pack as a carry-on.

It’s vital to understanding how your product fulfills its target market’s specific needs. For the suitcase company discussed above, for instance, the target market would be people who benefit from a lightweight, carry-on suitcase—such as business travelers who take short, frequent trips.

03. Investigate your competitors

Hone in on your target market even further by taking a look at which your competitors are targeting. Of course you won't have access to their customer analytics data, but you can understand their customers with a SWOT analysis .

Take a deep dive into competitor websites, blogs and social channels. Consider who their target market is based on their website content, content marketing strategy, and social media branding. You’ll likely be able to infer details about their audience based on their brand language and tone. You can also check for comments on their social media pages to see which types of people are engaging with their posts.

Take an especially close look at their most successful social media and blog posts. Do these pieces of content have anything in common in terms of their offering or branding? Which interests or needs do they address? Use this information to consider what kinds of qualities or advantages appeal most to consumers within your industry.

04. Segment your audience

At this point, you’ve gathered some information about the characteristics and interests of your target audience. Now, it’s time to use that information to clearly define your customer types. This is going to form the basis of your target market.

The best way to do this is through market segmentation. This involves dividing your customers into different groups, or segments, based on their shared qualities.

You can divide your customers based on:

Geography: Physical location, whether it’s your own city or a different part of the world. Note that if your customers are located around the world, you may need to create a multilingual website, as well as localized ads and marketing materials.

Demographics: Characteristics such as age, gender, race or ethnicity, income level, or marital status.

Psychographics: Inner qualities such as personality, lifestyle, or personal values. These are often a product of geographic and demographic factors such as location, generation, or stage of life.

Behavior: Perceived qualities based on online behavior, such as buyer readiness or frequency of use.

If you’re a B2B company, use similar characteristics but apply them to business. Consider firm demographics—known as firmographics—such as industry, location, customer size, business structure, and performance.

To gain a deeper understanding of your segments, you can also create buyer personas. Also called user personas, buyer personas are imaginary characters with traits and behaviors similar to those of typical customers. Ultimately, these fictional characters represent your target market, helping you gain insights into the needs, desires, and lifestyles of your actual customers.

05. Write a target market statement

Now that you’ve determined the defining features of your audience, it’s time to put your findings on paper. Write a target market statement that focuses on the most important audience characteristics you’ve identified in your research. Your statement should include:

Demographic information about your target market, such as gender and age.

Geographic location of your target market.

Key interests of your target market.

Then, sum it up in a single sentence. For example:

“Our target market is women in their 30s and 40s who live in the United States and enjoy casual, comfortable fashion.”

Doing this will keep your brand identity and marketing efforts consistent. It will also come in useful as you adapt your company’s mission statement to be as relevant as possible for your audience.

06. Refine your research

Defining your target market is based on thorough research, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect the first time around. Even after you identify your market, you’ll still need to continually test and experiment to get an increasingly precise picture of your customers. Staying on top of your market research can also help you keep up with the times, as consumer interests change over the years with technological developments, generational attitudes and passing trends.

To narrow in on your audience, you’ll need to assess your business success and test your targeting efforts. Take a look at who is actually buying from you and which specific products or services they are purchasing. Try to understand how you can adapt future product development or modify your branding or marketing efforts to better fit your customer base.

Utilize A/B testing with your marketing efforts to test the same ad on different audiences and see which version performs better. Alternatively, you can develop two different creatives, each with their own look and language and compare your audience’s responses. Based on the results, you might need to either adjust your business strategy or revise your target market statement. The bottom line is to build a brand that resonates strongly with your audience. Remember, the more targeted your content, the more effective your lead generation strategies—and the more customers you’ll bring to your brand.

What are examples of a target market?

These website examples clearly cater to their target markets. Take note of the phrases and visuals these websites use.

01. Amanda Darby

Let’s take a look at how nutritionist Amanda Darby appeals to her target market. She aims to address people looking to make healthier food and dieting choices. To do this, she’s created a website that fosters a sense of joy and personal empowerment around food. The light and airy background, coupled with the cheerful images of cooking and eating, instantly makes it clear that she targets people looking for a healthy lifestyle.

She also hones in on her audience even further, using phrases that directly appeal to middle-aged women. In the section of her homepage that discusses her nutrition coaching: “You will be the mom who loves food, her body, and knows life isn't perfect, but is perfectly happy living the life she has vs. waiting for the life she will have when she reaches her goal weight.” By directly addressing the concerns of her target market, Amanda helps her audience feel heard and understood. This strengthens their trust in her brand and persuades them that she is the right coach for their needs.

02. Curtinsmith Guitars

From the very first image that appears across the top of this website, it’s clear that Curtinsmith Guitars is crafting something unique. By displaying photographs of their workshop and describing their guitars as “custom” and “handmade,” they directly single out a target market of those looking for unique, one-of-a-kind guitars. This target market is likely musical, appreciative of craftsmanship and not afraid to spend their money on their passions.

The About Us section of the site confirms this targeting. The owner, Paul, writes, “I find it quite profound to create something which, in itself, will continue to create. It is an absolute joy crafting these instruments and it is my prayer that they continue to be a joy for those who play them and listen to them, for many generations.”

In this statement, the brand makes it clear that it targets musicians who value the creative process. They also allude to the quality of their product, portraying them as long-lasting heirlooms with sentimental value.

03. Lima Cakes

Sona Karapetyan uses her artistic vision to create showstopping celebratory cakes. The About section on her website says that Sona “was always experimenting with graphic art & design” and, “When Sona decided to embark on the cake art journey, she experimented with different textures, shapes and architectural elements to create a unique design language.” It also states that she never creates the same cake twice so each cake is unique to each client.

Her neutral-colored web design and sophisticated copy narrow her target market down to mature individuals who appreciate art. Her website also features images of her cakes, clearly displaying her skills to her potential customers. The prices of her custom-made cakes will reflect the effort that goes into each one. These details show that she likely targets an educated, older, affluent crowd with an appreciation for modern art and design.

What are market segments?

Market segments are subgroups within a larger market that share specific characteristics and needs. These characteristics can include demographics, lifestyle, interests, behavior and purchasing patterns. By identifying and understanding these segments, businesses can tailor their marketing messages, products and services to better resonate with each group. This allows for more targeted and effective marketing efforts.

Target market FAQ

How detailed should a target market be.

The level of detail for a target market depends on your specific business and goals. However, it should be defined enough to create targeted marketing campaigns and avoid wasting resources. Consider including demographic information (age, gender, income, etc.), psychographics (lifestyle, values, interests), and behavioral factors (purchasing habits, media consumption). While details are important, avoid over-segmentation, as it can limit your reach and marketing effectiveness.

What is an example of a target market?

What is the purpose of a target market, what is the best target market, related posts.

How to start an art business in 8 steps

How to start a contractor business in 6 steps

How to start a plumbing business in 7 steps

Was this article helpful?

Providing clear, actionable guidance on a regular basis to help investors and traders navigate the uncertain and often irrational financial markets.

If you manage the downside, the upside will take care of itself.

Our mission is to provide clear, actionable guidance on a regular basis to help investors and traders navigate the uncertain and often irrational financial markets. We put hours of effort into creating our reports, while leveraging our ~80 years of combined experience to analyze the key market-moving events and distill that into a cogent outlook.

We attempt to provide something for all types of market participants – from long-term investors to short-term traders – while maintaining our conviction that the best approach to the financial markets is to follow the primary trends and manage risk along the way.

We think in terms of “secular” bull and bear markets lasting several years, but are not afraid to make bold “trading calls” from time to time when we spot opportunities or warning signals.

We view ourselves as risk managers first and foremost. As I have learned in my 50+ years in this business, if you manage the downside, the upside will take care of itself.

Receive multiple core Strategy and Tactical reports per week. Timely, actionable, with ideas from us and some of the smartest market minds we know

Meet the team.

The three of us have worked together for many years and each offer different skill sets and approaches to the market. In addition to providing our opinions, we also share some insights into what we are doing in our own portfolios.

Colorful market commentary from a Wall Street legend. Jeff uses a combination of fundamental / technical analysis, conversations with leading industry figures, proprietary model indicators, and his decades of experience to provide a unique outlook on the financial markets. In addition to his interesting anecdotes and stories, Jeff has a long, successful track record of calling it like he sees it and not being afraid to make a bold claim. Jeff will also include in his reports promising investment ideas that he comes across that meet his screening criteria.

Andrew Adams CFA, CMT

His Charts of the Week and Trading Flash reports take a “balance of evidence”, probability-based technical look at the financial markets multiples times per week, while drawing attention to any interesting developments he sees in the charts. As a full-time trader, Andrew is singularly focused on the day-to-day action, which helps him stay in sync with the message of the market. Additionally, he often comments on some of the popular talking points of the day and provides regular trade ideas for both the short and intermediate term.

Harry Katica CFA

During his long career as a fundamental equities analyst, financial advisor, financial industry manager, and investor, Harry has viewed the markets through many different lenses and now combines that experience to write narrative-driven summaries and outlooks for the various market sectors. Within these reports, he highlights possible investment opportunities in individual stocks by taking a value-based, sometimes contrarian look at situations where a company is dislocated from its perceived worth. Each week, Harry provides updates to his “Focus List” and “Large Cap Yielder” portfolios.

• Boeing-stock
• News for Boeing

Boeing: Poised for Recovery with Strong Market Position and Improving Execution

Citi analyst Jason Gursky maintained a Buy rating on Boeing ( BA – Research Report ) yesterday and set a price target of $224.00.

Jason Gursky has given his Buy rating due to a combination of factors involving Boeing’s enduring commercial market position and robust defense demand. Despite the recent challenges including a pandemic, workforce issues, and regulatory scrutiny, Gursky sees these setbacks as temporary obstacles. He expresses confidence in the company’s path toward improvement, emphasizing the near completion of labor negotiations and potential for positive news flow. The labor dispute is not expected to be prolonged, which aligns with the economic motivations of both parties involved. The crux of Gursky’s optimistic outlook is Boeing’s strong backlog in the commercial sector stretching into the 2030s and the current geopolitical climate bolstering defense demand, both of which provide substantial revenue visibility. Moreover, with the pandemic-induced workforce depletion being gradually overcome, productivity is anticipated to rebound. Gursky does not perceive any structural impairment in Boeing’s business model when compared to the pre-2019 era. He acknowledges there are hurdles to surpass but with new leadership and a focused management team, Boeing is poised to improve its execution, cash generation, and reduce debt, all of which underpin his Buy recommendation.

In another report released on September 13, UBS also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $240.00 price target.

TipRanks tracks over 100,000 company insiders, identifying the select few who excel in timing their transactions. By upgrading to TipRanks Premium, you will gain access to this exclusive data and discover crucial insights to guide your investment decisions. Begin your TipRanks Premium journey today.

Boeing (BA) Company Description:

Founded in 1916, The Boeing Co. is the world’s largest aerospace company, which manufactures and sells airplanes, rockets, satellites, human space flights and launch systems, and missiles worldwide. It also provides leasing and product support services. Its products include operates through the following segments: Commercial Airplanes; Defense, Space and Security; Global Services; and Boeing Capital.

Read More on BA:

• UBS expects pressure on Boeing shares until union deal signed
• Boeing work strike could lead to additional funding, says Barclays
• Moody’s places Boeing on review for downgrade after worker strike
• Boeing CFO says too soon to predict free cash flow for 2024, 2025
• Boeing to take ‘necessary actions’ to keep investment rating, says CFO

Boeing News MORE

Related Stocks

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Lessons learned from the MOMENT study on how to recruit and retain a target population online, across borders, and with automated remote data collection

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Project administration, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

Affiliation University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Affiliations Tor Vergata University of Rome, Rome, Italy, Wroclaw Medical University, Wrocław, Poland

Roles Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States of America

Affiliation Boston College Connell School of Nursing, Boston, MA, United States of America

Affiliation University of Michigan School of Public Health, Ann Arbor, MI, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

• Andrew Belfiglio, 
• Shayleigh Dickson Page, 
• Sara Pettersson, 
• Michelle van Rijn, 
• Ercole Vellone, 
• Heleen Westland, 
• Kenneth E. Freedland, 
• Christopher Lee, 
• Anna Strömberg, 

• Published: September 16, 2024
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440
• Reader Comments

Increasingly, studies use social media to recruit, enroll, and collect data from participants. This introduces a threat to data integrity: efforts to produce fraudulent data to receive participant compensation, e.g., gift cards. MOMENT is an online symptom-monitoring and self-care study that implemented safeguards to protect data integrity. Facebook, Twitter, and patient organizations were used to recruit participants with chronic health conditions in four countries (USA, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden). Links to the REDCap baseline survey were posted to social media accounts. The initial study launch, where participants completed the baseline survey and were automatically re-directed to the LifeData ecological momentary assessment app, was overwhelmed with fraudulent responses. In response, safeguards (e.g., reCAPTCHA, attention checks) were implemented and baseline data was manually inspected prior to LifeData enrollment. The initial launch resulted in 411 responses in 48 hours, 265 of which (64.5%) successfully registered for the LifeData app and were considered enrolled. Ninety-nine percent of these were determined to be fraudulent. Following implementation of safeguards, the re-launch yielded 147 completed baselines in 3.5 months. Eighteen cases (12.2%) were found fraudulent and not invited to enroll. Most fraudulent cases in the re-launch (15 of 18) were identified by a single attention check question. In total, 96.1% of fraudulent responses were to the USA-based survey. Data integrity safeguards are necessary for research studies that recruit online and should be reported in manuscripts. Three safeguard strategies were effective in preventing and removing most of the fraudulent data in the MOMENT study. Additional strategies were also used and may be necessary in other contexts.

Citation: Belfiglio A, Page SD, Pettersson S, van Rijn M, Vellone E, Westland H, et al. (2024) Lessons learned from the MOMENT study on how to recruit and retain a target population online, across borders, and with automated remote data collection. PLoS ONE 19(9): e0307440. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440

Editor: Yury Shevchenko, University of Konstanz: Universitat Konstanz, GERMANY

Received: September 8, 2023; Accepted: July 1, 2024; Published: September 16, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Belfiglio et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data underlying the results (creation of the data quality flags) presented in the study are available from Dryad: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0gb5mkm92 . Since these data were found to be >99% phony responses from bots, they should not be used to draw meaningful conclusions about chronic disease self-management, but instead may only be useful for reproducing the results of this study or to produce alternative methods to detect bot behavior.

Funding: BR and TJ received pilot funding from Australian Catholic University https://www.acu.edu.au/ . The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The internet has increased the ability to reach patients who may otherwise be missed in traditional point-of-care clinic settings and thereby has demonstrated its potential as a tool for improving public health and medical care. It is also a powerful tool for the conduct of health care research. Increasingly, researchers are turning to online survey applications and platforms like social media to recruit, enroll, and collect data from participants [ 1 – 5 ].

Virtual or online research methods have appeal for both researchers and participants in that they may remove barriers to engaging in research, improve convenience of data collection, and increase resource efficiency [ 5 ]. In-person healthcare touchpoints are the dominant and conventional opportunities to identify potential study participants and complete research assessments. For example, persons with chronic heart failure may be recruited to a research study while in the waiting room for their cardiology appointment. Through ease of access, greater convenience, and less reliance on institutional pathways, conducting research online may improve the inclusion of patients who live in areas with a shortage of providers, or who face other barriers to accessing the healthcare system such as difficulty with transportation, mobility, social support systems, or uninsurance or underinsurance [ 3 , 6 , 7 ].

Online research studies can improve convenience for patients and research teams by allowing asynchronous activities [ 8 – 10 ]. Patients do not have to align their schedules with researchers in order to enroll and participate in studies. For minimal risk studies, it is possible for participants to “self-enroll” and respond to assessments on their own time and from any location. This not only improves convenience for participants but also saves valuable research resources such as staff time, data collection materials, office/lab space, and remuneration for participant transportation and parking. Further, online research can be designed to efficiently enroll participants and collect data from national and international populations.

With the potential to reach billions of individuals across the globe, researchers are increasingly using social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) for participant recruitment [ 2 – 4 ]. Facebook is now the largest web-based social media platform, with about 2.6 billion users worldwide [ 11 ]. In the USA alone, there are approximately 223 million Facebook users, most of whom access the site at least once a day, and Twitter (recently renamed as X) has over 550 million users worldwide [ 12 ]. The utility of social media recruitment for a research study depends on the population being recruited and the goals of the study. Topolovec-Vranic and Natarajan found that social media recruitment was the most effective recruitment method for just 40% of studies reviews [ 4 ]. Recruitment through social media may improve access to “hard-to-reach” populations (e.g., people who use drugs) or individuals with specific diagnoses [ 3 , 4 ]. However, those recruited through social media may differ from the general population in key demographic characteristics. Namely, participants recruited through social media tend to be younger compared to traditional recruitment methods [ 2 – 4 ]. The cost of recruitment through social media is highly variable as researchers may purchase paid ads that target specific demographics, use unpaid posts to share recruitment materials, or a combination. While paid advertisements at Facebook for health-related study recruitment have increased [ 13 ], the cost-effectiveness of using paid ads versus unpaid posts on Facebook is unclear [ 2 ]. Most research reporting on social media recruitment has been conducted in the United States; less is known about the strengths and weaknesses of using social media to recruit international populations.

Through social media advertising and the automation of research activities, researchers may be able reach more participants and increase the efficiency of their research staff time. However, researchers must carefully consider the study design and recruitment strategy to reach the target population and prevent fraudulent data from being submitted. Several authors have published experiences and recommendations for protecting data integrity [ 1 , 14 – 16 ]. Teitcher et al., describe strategies to detect and prevent fraudulent data at four levels: the questionnaire or survey instrument (e.g., include duplicate questions and monitor responses for consistency), the participant’s non-questionnaire data (e.g., check for similar email addresses), the computer information (e.g., track IP addresses), and the study design (e.g., reducing emphasis on the compensation) [ 1 ]. Further, following suspected fraudulent activity, Pozzar et al used a similar set of data quality indicators and found that 94.5% of submissions were fraudulent [ 14 ]. The work to date has shown that fraudulent data can be a significant problem in cross-sectional observational studies.

In conducting the MOMENT (SyMptOMs and SElf-Care iN Chronic Illness ManagemenT) study–a multinational, longitudinal study in which we recruited and enrolled adults with chronic conditions to use a mobile app twice daily–we received an influx of fraudulent data that demonstrated the increasing sophistication of perpetrators. In this paper, we use this experience to (1) describe important methodological considerations regarding the use of apps and automating data collection across different countries, (2) identify challenges to reaching participants through social media internationally, and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of implementing strategies to prevent bots and related threats to data integrity in longitudinal studies.

MOMENT used ecological daily assessment (EDA) over a two-week period to measure symptoms of chronic diseases, self-care management behaviors, and the factors that influence decisions about self-care. EDA is a data collection technique in which the participant’s behaviors (i.e., self-care in response to symptoms) are repeatedly sampled in approximately real time [ 17 ]. Eligibility criteria of the MOMENT study included having one or more of the following chronic conditions: arthritis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure, and/or diabetes; having at least 3 months of experience with the condition(s); and experiencing bothersome symptom(s) at least three times weekly. MOMENT was designed as an international study because responses to symptoms have been shown to differ between countries [ 18 ]. In this study, participants lived in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, or the United States, because the research team members were located in these countries. Data were collected between May 4, 2022 and September 30, 2022.

After completing baseline surveys about health and self-care management behaviors (i.e., actions taken in response to symptoms), participants completed two weeks of EDA. Using an app on the participant’s own smartphone, participants were prompted to complete twice daily (11am & 7pm, local time) reports about their most bothersome symptom for two weeks. These times were considered least burdensome and most likely to receive a response (i.e., least likely times for a participant to be unavailable due to sleep, commuting, or typical meal times). With each prompt, participants reported (i) the characteristics of the symptom (severity, bothersomeness, frequency), (ii) their interpretation of the cause of the symptom, (iii) their response to the symptom (which could include either certain self-care management behavior(s) or no response), and (iv) why they chose that action (or inaction). At the end of the two weeks, participants completed a survey on the acceptability of the mobile app and had the option to complete an additional individual phone interview about their experience.

Apps and automation

After receiving Institutional Review Board approval from the University of Pennsylvania, the team set up enrollment and data collection procedures that were initially fully automated. The social media recruitment flyers (described below) directed participants to REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) to complete eligibility screening, informed consent, and baseline surveys. REDCap is a secure, web-based software platform designed to support data capture for research studies, providing an intuitive interface for validated data capture and automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages [ 19 , 20 ]. The Multi-Language Management module was used to provide the baseline survey in four different languages simultaneously. This allowed data entered by participants in four different languages to be maintained in a single database. English was designated as the base language and translations in Italian, Dutch, and Swedish were provided by the native speaking study team members. Completion of the baseline survey prompted an automated transition to LifeData experience sampling software, where participants then entered twice daily EDA data for two weeks. Four separate “LifePaks” were created to assess the daily symptom monitoring questions in Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and English through prompts delivered via push notification to participants’ smartphones.

Data collection was automated by a number of processes in REDCap and LifeData (see Fig 1 ). The rationale for automation was that an immediate transition from the baseline survey to downloading the mobile app would reduce study attrition. After completing the REDCap baseline survey, participants were automatically re-directed to download the LifeData app. The link enabled participants to install the LifeData app from their phone’s app store and, upon successful installation, immediately complete the start-up session where they selected their condition and the symptom they wished to report on for the next two weeks. Participants then received a mobile push notification two times a day for two weeks. Clicking on the push notification or opening the LifeData app triggered a series of multiple choice and free-text questions within the app. Thorough testing was required to ensure all automation and translation functioned appropriately. Translations were important to test because the meaning of words and phrases can change once seen in the context of the survey. This was especially true for user interface language, such as “next,” “required,” and “submit,” as well as the error messages and other system notifications. All interface language was available to translate in the Multi-Language Management module. All members of the research team and some invited colleagues, friends, and family members from each country participated in testing the survey to ensure automation and translation was appropriate and clear.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440.g001

Participant recruitment

We aimed to recruit all participants via social media, defined as websites or mobile apps that enable users to create and share information and to build virtual communities [ 21 ]. Social media was chosen for its wide reach and demographic diversity, as opposed to crowdsourcing platforms which may not reach as broad of a population. Variations of the advertisement were created with condition-specific content (to share through medical condition-specific organizations) as well as with content that included all of the relevant medical conditions (to share through organizations that include people with diverse conditions). Each advertisement included a QR code or link to REDCap.

Three general approaches to recruitment were designed: (1) flyers distributed through the social medial channels of patient support organizations, (2) flyers posted directly to social media, and (3) paid advertisements. Research staff in each country tailored the recruitment approaches for each local context and flyers were posted in the local language (i.e., Italian, Dutch, Swedish, English).

In all four countries, patient support organizations were identified via internet search and asked to assist in sharing the study flyer through social media channels (e.g., Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram).

In Sweden and the US, flyers were also posted directly to Facebook. The search function on Facebook was used to identify Groups (i.e., public or private online communities centered around a topic), and Pages (i.e., public profiles of organizations) where adults with one of the five chronic conditions exchange support and information about their chronic condition(s). Depending on the preferences and rules of the Group or Page, the flyer was posted either by the researcher or the administrator of the Group or Page. In addition, study team members posted the study flyer on their personal Facebook and Twitter/X pages; these posts could then be shared or retweeted.

In the US, paid advertisements were posted on Facebook and visible to Facebook users older than 18 years old residing in the US. The paid advertisements were closed after 24 hours due to technical errors with posting that Facebook support was unable to resolve. The ads were said to violate Facebook’s terms, but no other details were given, and attempts to reach Facebook customer support went unanswered.

Recruitment took place between March 2022 and September 2022. Remuneration for participation was provided via an Amazon gift card. A maximum of 30 US dollars could be earned by completing the study, an amount that was chosen by the study team based on past research experience across the four countries and participant feedback from a small pilot study (data not included). Using loss aversion principles from behavioral economics [ 22 ], we structured the remuneration plan such that participants started with 30 US dollars in an electronic bank and $1 was deducted for each missed prompt.

Data integrity safeguards

Within 48 hours of the initial launch of the study, an influx of fraudulent responses was received from suspected “bots”–computer programs created by individuals or groups who try to siphon research dollars by “completing” studies and receiving the participant compensation. In response, the team temporarily closed the surveys, and the safeguards described below were incorporated into the REDCap baseline survey.

First, the REDCap administrator at the University of Pennsylvania enabled the reCAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) feature, which requires participants to check a box or answer questions to prove their legitimacy before proceeding to the baseline survey. Second, honeypot, attention check, and consistency check questions were added to the REDCap survey to help identify bots and respondents who provided invalid data (see definitions in Fig 2 ). Third, the automatic redirect from REDCap to LifeData was removed (see Fig 1 ). Instead, the researchers performed a manual inspection of the REDCap responses using prespecified criteria, described below. Only participants who passed this data quality inspection were invited to complete the longitudinal portion of the study on the LifeData app. Lastly, a payment verification survey, which was created using another data collection software (Qualtrics), was used to add a second CAPTCHA test and to ask the participant to recall which condition and symptom they reported on daily for the past two weeks. The payment verification survey was emailed to participants after completing the study as an additional precaution to avoid including data from and paying participant incentives to bots. This addition was motivated by the observed sophistication of bot responses (i.e., the ability to temporarily retain memory of their previous responses within the baseline survey) in the first launch. Since response initiation times to the EDA app prompts (i.e., the time of push notification to the time of EDA session initiation) in the initial launch did not display a recognizable pattern, a fast response to the push notification was not considered a flag.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440.g002

The hidden honeypot question asked “In what country do you live?” to appear like a real question. The attention check instructed the participant to “rate this question as ’fair’,” with the instructions nested within a longer question that followed the length and format of others around it. The consistency check asked “What is your age?” multiple times throughout the survey.

The manual inspection criteria (i.e., data quality flags) for REDCap and LifeData responses were created based on patterns of fraudulent responses received in the initial launch, the team’s past data collection experience, and a blog post by a researcher with similar experience [ 23 ]. Yellow, orange, and red “flags” were assigned to each criterion based on how certain we were that the response indicated a fraudulent response (see all criteria in Fig 2 ). Yellow indicated an unusual response, orange indicated a suspicious response, and red was a definitive indicator of a fraudulent response. Participants were considered a ‘reasonable exclusion’ if they had: (a.) any red flags, (b.) two or more orange flags, (c.) four or more flags, one of which was orange, or (d.) failed the payment verification survey. Thresholds for exclusion were intended to be conservative in that it should be more likely to include a convincing fraudulent response than to exclude a legitimate respondent.

Inclusivity in global research

Additional information regarding the ethical, cultural, and scientific considerations specific to inclusivity in global research is included in the Supporting Information ( S1 Checklist ).

Effectiveness of data integrity safeguards

Within 48 hours of the initial launch, 411 responses to the REDCap baseline survey were received. Over 99% of these responses were later determined to be fraudulent, which prompted the redesign of the data collection methods and relaunch of study recruitment. Impressively, of the 411 responses received, 265 (64.5%) successfully registered for LifeData using their ID number provided by REDCap and entered EDA data over the two-week period, demonstrating the sophistication of the bots to participate in longitudinal research. This may have been accomplished through a phone farm–a network of programmed mobile devices–since each LifeData app installation requires a singular device. Only 7 of 411 (1.7%), however, passed manual inspection criteria, and only 2 (0.5%) passed payment verification. The two respondents who passed inspection and payment verification were considered legitimate and included in the final sample. All fraudulent responses selected the English (US) version of the survey; however, geolocation was not collected so the location of the bots cannot be known.

After adding the reCAPTCHA feature to the REDCap baseline survey, responses decreased from 411 in 48 hours (~8.5 responses per hour) to 147 in 3 months (<0.1 responses per hour). Manual inspection in the re-launch found that 11.6% of records (17 of 147) included invalid data and as a result were not invited to register in LifeData. Fifteen of these cases were identified through a single attention check question wherein the participant was told which answer to select, but they did not select that answer. The remaining two flagged cases were identified through a combination of excessive comorbidity (i.e., every comorbid condition is selected in checklist of 13 conditions), suspicious pattern of responses (i.e., zig-zag pattern through a matrix question set), and suspicious responses to open-ended questions (i.e., non-sensical, unrelated, or unusual language).

Recruitment and retention

During the relaunch, a total of 147 responses were received in the REDCap baseline survey. After manual data inspection, 127 (86.4%) were determined to have valid data and were invited to LifeData to report on symptoms for two weeks (see Fig 3 ). Of those invited to LifeData, 81 (63.8%) successfully completed registration, received twice daily prompts for two weeks, and were considered enrolled in the study. Ninety-six percent of enrolled participants responded to at least one prompt and the majority (81%) responded to at least 75% of the prompts.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440.g003

Combining valid responses from the initial launch and relaunch phases, all of the participating countries were represented, though participation was lower in the US. Italy (n = 22), the Netherlands (n = 25), Sweden (n = 24) and the United States (n = 10) accounted for the total 81 enrolled participants. Each of the five chronic conditions were represented by participants from at least three of the four involved countries. The recruitment, retention, and exclusion of participants of the combined initial launch and relaunch is summarized in Fig 3 . Demographic characteristics of participants in the final sample are provided in Table 1 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440.t001

With regards to the acceptance of gift card incentives to participate in research, 16 of 81 participants (19.8%) did not complete the payment verification survey to receive the gift card. During optional post-interviews, some European participants found it strange to be paid for research and others did not like Amazon (the gift card provided), which may explain non-completion. Of the 65 who completed payment verification and to whom gift cards were emailed, only 51 (78.5%) had redeemed the gift card as of six months post-study closure.

User experience

At the end of the study, some of the participants indicated their willingness to schedule a brief interview to share their experiences with the app and were contacted by the researcher. The participants from Italy and US did not respond when contacted, four Dutch participants and one Swedish participant consented and were interviewed. All interviewees reported that the app was easy to use and the questions were clear. They said that the twice-daily push notifications prompting them to report their symptoms in the app were helpful. Four participants felt that the timing of the push notifications was convenient as they occurred around lunch time and around dinner time. One participant appreciated the two-hour response window as it allowed them to postpone the response to a time that was more convenient for them. All participants reported that the time required to respond was acceptable and took no longer than 5 minutes. Some participants felt forced to choose an answer that did not completely fit their symptoms and response. Almost all participants indicated that they would have preferred open-ended questions in the app. One participant noted the absence of questions about mental state was problematic because the perception of symptoms can be related to this.

This paper describes lessons learned about automating data collection across countries, recruiting participants through social media internationally, and protecting data integrity while conducting a longitudinal observational study on self-care of chronic illness. The need for data integrity safeguards in all online research has been reported in the literature and is further highlighted by the results of the MOMENT study. First, the ubiquity of “bot” computer programs written to take online surveys to collect gift card incentives is demonstrated in the over 400 responses received in the first 48 hours of the initial study launch (8.6 responses per hour). The use of CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA is essential for preventing bots from entering a research study that permits automated remote enrollment. After the REDCap administrator enabled the CAPTCHA feature, the survey response rate normalized. However, even after implementing the CAPTCHA safeguard, a considerable proportion of responses were still deemed invalid and were excluded from the final sample. Most of the responses with invalid data were identifiable with a single attention check question. However, we also detected invalid data from multiple data quality flags. It is possible for a participant to unknowingly guess the correct answer to an attention check question, so it is critical to include multiple safeguards beyond a single attention check question. The manual data inspection process we used–inspecting the REDCap baseline survey for data quality flags before inviting participants to continue to the LifeData app–was critical for minimizing data integrity threats to this longitudinal study. Inclusion of the post-study payment verification survey provided a final safeguard prior to remuneration and reassurance that the longitudinal data were valid. These processes were essential to protect against bots but can also extend to human respondents who provide fake data.

When publishing the protocol or the results of a research study that recruited participants online and allowed participants to self-enroll, authors should report the multiple specific safeguards implemented to ensure data integrity. The extent of fraudulent responses in this study was similar to that of Pozzar et al. [ 14 ] This constitutes a significant threat to data integrity in online research. Given the general lack of safeguards reported in current literature, it is possible that published results contain invalid data. This has likely resulted in both Type I and Type II errors in recent scientific literature. The current investigators were alerted to the data integrity threat by the influx of survey responses that we received, but bots may become more sophisticated to elude detection. Therefore, researchers must be proactive to support data integrity and strategies will have to evolve over time in order to address increasingly sophisticated threats to data security as they emerge.

These data integrity considerations are important because automating study procedures and recruiting participants through social media can be highly efficient. The MOMENT study recruited participants from age 20 to 80, with one of five chronic conditions, across four countries. This shows that recruiting through social media can reach a wide variety of participants. However, in this study, recruitment on social media was more effective in the three European countries compared to the US. One reason for the difference in effectiveness of social media recruitment outside of the U.S. could be the remuneration amount that may have been lower than what participants expected for what was required of them in this study [ 24 ].

Participants reported that the study procedures were acceptable and convenient, except that they wanted more open-ended questions for reporting on their symptoms because their situations can be complicated. A few participants had trouble registering for the LifeData app to receive daily smartphone prompts. This was remedied by providing step-by-step instructions with screenshots as a troubleshooting guide. Retention was satisfactory, in that more than half of baseline respondents continued to report twice daily symptom occurrence for two weeks, with high rates of responses to the daily prompts, despite a relatively modest compensation of $30 US dollars. This result could underscore the user-friendly design of the data collection procedures or the increased study buy-in associated with recruiting through trusted patient organizations and online communities. Considering the challenges that researchers have faced in adequately recruiting a sample from social media platforms [ 25 ], our strategy in recruiting exclusively from social media can be replicated in future studies while simultaneously strengthening the integrity of data sources derived from online research.

The lessons learned from the MOMENT study can help others to effectively design online studies and avoid common challenges associated with apps and automating data collection, reaching participants online, and preventing bots and related threats to data integrity. While employing apps and automation offers tremendous benefits, rigorous testing of the instruments and providing troubleshooting guides for participants are essential features for ensuring that participants will be able to conveniently enroll and participate in the research. Additionally, though recruiting online can help more participants find a study, it can also be found by “bots”–thus threatening the validity of the data. Lessons learned for automated, online data collection include: (1) thorough testing and revision to ensure participants will complete study procedures as expected; (2) a comprehensive data integrity plan, including monitoring plans and safeguards integrated into data collection such as CAPTCHAs and questions to flag threats to data validity; and (3) a readiness to troubleshoot, which includes a way for participants or the data collection system to alert the research team if they experience difficulty and, and ensuring that the team is prepared to make adjustments accordingly.

Supporting information

S1 checklist. inclusivity in global research questionnaire..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307440.s001

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 11. Social media: statistics and facts. [Internet]. Statista. 2022 [cited Feb 3, 2023]. Available from: https://www.statista.com/topics/1164/social-networks/#topicOverview .
• 12. Gramlich J. 10 facts about Americans and Facebook2021 04/10/2023. Available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/01/facts-about-americans-and-facebook/ .
• 23. Simone M. Bots started sabotaging my online research. I fought back. STAT [Internet]. 2019. Available from: https://www.statnews.com/2019/11/21/bots-started-sabotaging-my-online-research-i-fought-back/ .