How to define and refine your target market

Research will allow you a better understanding of key markets, different types of visitors, and their interests. This information can be useful to help shape your marketing strategy.

There are a few key things to think about when defining your target audience but remember to keep it simple. You don’t need to delve too deeply into demographics and behavioural research.

Areas to consider when defining your target audience

Get to know your customer demographics

Start by taking some time to review your current customer database to give you an idea about your existing customer demographics. Knowledge about your current customers can help you identify similarities between them. 

You can also make use of monitoring and insights tools across your channels to track your traffic, such as Google Analytics for your website. Online travel agents (OTAs) can also provide reportable data on customer demographics and listing views.

Using Google Analytics on your website.

When you’re reviewing your data, here are some questions to help shape your target audience:

• where do your customers live?
• what age bracket do they fall into?
• do they travel as a family, couple, groups or solo travellers?

Consider consumer behaviours

Check your social media and online activity to determine what content works and leads to strong engagement. Look at posts, pages and emails which have had lots of likes, positive comments and shares. It will help you work out what type of content is most engaging for your target audience.

Another part of the user journey to consider is how your customers book. Are they booking directly with you, through an OTA or with another third party?

Reviewing all this information together will help you to build up a picture of:

• the channels that your customers use
• how they access information
• what inspires them

Complete a competitor analysis

Carrying out regular competitor analysis lets you understand what others are doing in the marketplace.

Here are some top tips for completing competitor analysis:

• Follow competitor social media channels to get an idea of what they are posting and how their posts are performing.
• Keep an eye on other marketing activities such as print media, travel partners and other digital partners.
• Check what your competitors are doing on OTA sites and where they appear in Google rankings. Are there any sites where competitors are listed, and you are not?

Understanding what your competitors are doing gives you the chance to identify gaps in the market. Use this to develop your product and messaging accordingly.

Know your product

Take some time to think about your product in relation to your target audience.

• what is unique about it?
• what do you want to tell people about it?
• what are your key selling points?

When creating your messaging and marketing strategy, make sure your key selling points link back to what you have identified as inspiring to your target audience.

Once you have developed a profile of your audience, the next step is to build your marketing strategy and story around them.

Use the insights you’ve gained through your research of customer demographics, website, social media and competitor analytics to hone your messaging for that specific target audience. You want to talk directly to your market with communication that interests and inspires them.

Examples

If you notice your social media posts featuring natural surroundings get consistently high engagement with your audience, plan more of these posts into your social media strategy.

If your website stats reveal most of your customers are international, make sure you have appropriate content that serves the needs of this audience, prioritising content for international visitors through your choice of topics, copy and imagery.

Further resources

If you’re ready to dive deeper into target audiences, there are some great resources available around how to build personas and archetypes, as well as some top tips for beginners around further user research and testing.

UX Design Institute - What are user personas?

User testing for beginners by ContentSquare