Two distinct segments:

20-35-year olds:

  • Incomes of $35,000- $85,000.

  • 53% have at least some college education.

  • 23% have a graduate degree.

  • Enjoy spending time with friends.

  • Have friends but have difficulty in meeting interesting single people.

  • Would prefer not to meet people in bar environments, the typical place people of this age group meet others.

36-60-year olds:

  • Incomes of $55,000- $100,000.

  • 65% of the people have a college degree.

  • 41% have been married once.

  • As they grow older they have had increased difficulty finding others their age.

  • Have a tried a multitude of methods for meeting people, generally unsuccessful.

  • Take the position that it cannot hurt to try new methods of meeting people.

Defining Target Audience

There are some steps you should take before you start with a deep target audience research – define common characteristics of your average buyer.

While defining demographics is important you should give more thought to what kind of people you’re talking to, what they like/dislike, what are their problems, pain points and so on.

This will allow you to create more engaging website that will have a better chance to strike a chord with your potential customers.

1. Demographics

Having right demographics data is important.

Here are the main and secondary characteristics you should look to define.

Depending on the project you are working on, some of these characteristics could have little to no relevance and you shouldn’t waste your time on them. Also, there is always a possibility you will have to distinguish your target audience by an attribute that isn’t on this list so keep that in mind too.

Look at this list more as a recommended outline rather than a rule of law.

2. Psychographics

To avoid getting overly technical, the psychographics data is used for classifying people by looking at their attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria.

It ultimately allows you to find what are the motives behind people’s choices.

Defining psychographics can be really challenging because it revolves around subjective information in contrast to demographics that rely on hard statistical data.

There are 3 main areas you want to define:

  1. What are the interests of your target audience?

  2. What kind of activities (often hobbies) do they take part in?

  3. What are their attitudes/opinions towards particular subjects?

Knowing what information to look for is only the first step. Now you have to go out there and gather that data.

A few different ways to gather psychographics data:

  1. Make a survey

  2. Interview existing clients

  3. Research websites and forums they visit

3. Identifying Pain Points

Knowing pain points of the people you are reaching out to and trying to connect with is arguably the most important element in the whole story.

It allows you to create a website with a sole purpose of solving an actual problem or question that is bothering real consumers.

There are quite a few different ways you can employ to find your customer’s pain points.

3.1. Surveys

Conducting customer surveys is a great way to get valuable insight into consumer’s mind. However, if you plan to invest your time into it, you better have a plan.

1. Define the goals of your survey

Defining the information you want to get from your customers will help you craft the questions that reflect those goals.

2. Define who you want to survey

You may want to adjust your targets depending on the outreach channels you have at your disposal. You can try to engage:

  • Your friends or people interested in your niche

  • Regular users (if you already have a website)

  • Your social media followers

  • All of the above

3. Decide how will you reach out to them

Here are some options you may want to consider:

  • Send the survey to your email list

  • Share it across your social media channels

4. Decide which tool will you use to conduct the survey

The more popular tools on the market that can do this job well:

  • Google Forms

  • Survey Gizmo

  • Survey Monkey

  • Typeform

  • Survey Anyplace

3.2. Social Networks

If you know where to look at, social media metrics can give you a valuable insight into your customer pain points and what kind of content are they interested in general.

3.2.1. Facebook Insights

There is no point in trying to manually check anything on your FB fan page when Facebook tracks all the statistics you’ll ever need.

Now, FB Insights can be a post for itself so we won’t go into too many technical details. There are a lot of great guides out there you can check out if you need more info.

Besides demographics data, the most useful section you should pay attention to, in the context of analyzing your customer’s pain points and interests, is the Posts tab. You can check which kind of posts (link, photo or video) attracted the most engagement (Reactions, Comments & Shares) on average.

By looking at your top performing content, you could find a clue to what your followers want to know more about.

3.2.2. Facebook Groups

Another great way to find out what is troubling your target audience is to find and join Facebook groups in which people discuss your area of interest.

Finding these groups can be quite challenging, at least finding the ones where you can get some valuable feedback. You’ll probably join and leave 10 spammed ones before you stumble upon something worthwhile.

3.2.3. Twitter Analytics

The story is the same as it is with FB Insights. A lot of useful demographic information about your audience, but you want to concentrate on a few metrics that may point to their pain points.

Again, you want to look at the top performing content. You can do that by selecting the Top tweets tab while you are under the Tweets section.

Since we only focused on pain points in this section, we only touched on a few selected metrics. Both Facebook and Twitter have a lot of data about their users you can use to see what resonates with your audience the best. We highly recommend allocating some time to carefully go through everything they offer.

3.2.4. Look at what your competition does on social media

If you have some time to spare (or you don’t have enough followers to have a valid sample) you may want to look at what are your main competitors doing on social media.

Look at the type of content that gets the most engagement as that is something you may want to replicate and improve upon in the future since your target audience is obviously interested in it.

3.3. Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of those things that is easy to explain but gets really complicated, really fast when you try to conduct it.

There are a few different numbers floating around, but we can say for sure that at least 67% of users research sites online before choosing one. To find out pressing issues your customers have (and to subsequently provide them with answers and solutions), you need to know common questions and phrases they use while they’re doing their research.

There are a lot of great keyword research tools you can use like:

  • Google Keyword Planner

  • WordTracker

  • SEMRush

  • Ahrefs

  • LongTailPro

  • SERPStat

  • KWFinder

How do you do it?

Make a list of phrases you believe they use and run it through your tool of choice. After that, depending on the tool you are using, you should be able to see useful statistics like search volume, parent topic, posts that get most of the traffic that ranks for those keywords, additional keyword ideas and so on.

In the scope of target audience analysis, the first step (gathering the phrases) is arguably more important. The tools are here to confirm your suspicions and to give you additional insight into how many people have the same questions. If some phrase has a search volume of 3/month, while still being relevant, you may think twice before spending any resources on it.

3.4. Niche Forums

Forums are specifically designed to help people find answers to their questions. Is there a better way to find the real problems your audience is dealing with than to browse through forums related to your niche? Besides asking them directly, probably not.

Information found here will give you an answer on a really important question: "Is my perception of what the customer wants to know more about correct?"

3.5. Quora

Quora is a Q&A website – a glorified forum that covers all kinds of topics. It is on the rise for a few years now and last year it hit 100 million users mark.

The real boom happened when bloggers and marketers figured out they can get a decent referral traffic by answering selected questions and building up a following. Because of that, you will encounter mountains of biased answers you have to take with a grain of salt.

This is just a minor inconvenience since we’re way more interested in the questions then we are in the answers.

What makes Quora useful for the target audience research is that it covers a wide area of different topics and has a very user-friendly interface that allows you to go through a lot of questions in a short period of time.

However, not every question brings in the same value. That is why we have Question Stats. Knowing the number of views and users that are following a question tells you how many people are interested in this particular problem.

3.6. Reddit

As the largest platform of aggregated content and community discussion, as well as a member of top 10 largest websites in the world, Reddit is a force to be reckoned with. With so many users and such a large pool of topics covered, you are bound to find some relevant information on almost anything.

Find the subject you are interested in and look at discussions. Since this is also a Q&A site, you can quickly browse through questions and take a closer look at the ones that seem interesting and the ones that have a lot of comments.

Take some time to browse around. It is highly likely you’ll encounter questions that may lead to the pain points you’re searching for.

If you have any questions or feedback, you can message in comments below or reach me at facebook: Alexpilotgroup and email: [email protected]