The target audience is one of the key points that determines from which website you will take traffic, how effective your ad will work and how much you will spend before you start earning.
To deal with this, we have collected a number of key criteria that will help you determine the target audience for a specific offer.
The main criteria for determining the target audience
The target audience is divided into two segments:
- The main one is direct consumers of your product or service. For example, a woman that uses makeup.
- Indirect — those who can potentially interact with your product, while not being the main consumers. For example, a man may not use makeup, but will be ready to purchase it for his wife.
Below are a few basic criteria that will help you segment your audience:
Gender. What gender to target will depend on which offer you plan to work with. For example, a gym membership can be suitable for both men and women, but women are the main consumers of cosmetics and beauty products.
Age. Based on the age, solvency will follow and how useful your product is for a particular segment of people. For example, cosmetics can be age-related and are competitively suitable for women 35+, or, on the contrary, can be developed for younger skin.
Also, depending on the age of the audience, you can first draw conclusions about which social network is better to take traffic from. With regard to Russia, for example, an older audience uses Odnoklassniki, but TikTok is used more by younger generations.
Location. Depending on the location of your target audience, it will depend on how interesting your product is to your audience and is available for finance. For example, advertising of expensive sports nutrition is advisable to promote in large cities among the male audience, but in small cities the result can be much worse.
Solvency. The income can be quite misleading.
For example, not everyone can afford to buy the latest model of iPhone. However, surely everyone has examples among friends when a person's income is several times lower than the cost of the iPhone, but he has one. Most often, in these cases, the iPhone is purchased on credit, despite the fact that in the future a person will have to significantly limit himself in other spending for some time.
This example clearly shows that the ability to buy a product is determined from the ratio of the desire to have something to income. Thus, part of the audience is ready to purchase goods that are not included in their price category, due to the fact that the desire to possess a particular product is higher than the possibility.
This formula does not always work. For example, if a person wants a yacht, while the income is barely enough for food, no matter how he limits himself, he will still not be able to buy a yacht.
Based on this, when forming a portrait of your target audience, you need to take into account its income and how great the desire to use the advertised product or service is. If there is no need for your product, you need to create it. This will be discussed in the paragraph below.
You can also take into account the type of income: in front of you is a freelancer, an office worker, or a person earning income through physical labor. For example, a three-piece suit may be useful for an office worker, but it is unlikely that a builder or miner will need it.
The benefit of the product. It is not enough to simply determine the age and the solvency of your audience. It is necessary that the advertised product or service solve some problem of the buyer, improve his life. Or create the illusion of improvement.
If you are just starting to work with affiliate marketing and you are not sure that you know the target audience of the chosen offer, take a piece of paper and answer the questions from the list below:
- What pains / problems does the target audience have?
- How will the product / service help solve these problems?
- What are the fears of the potential customer before buying the product/service?
- Potential objections of the customer before purchasing your product?
To make it clear how it works, let's analyze it using a conditional example.
Let's say you need to promote a nutra offer with dietary supplements for weight loss.
Target audience: women 25+
Income level: average, up to $ 2500 per month
Pains of the target audience: they want to lose weight
How the product will help solve the problem: will help you quickly lose weight without unnecessary restrictions and exhausting diets
Concerns: The product may be harmful to the body
Potential Objection: Unknown manufacturer, therefore not proven to be effective.
It is not enough to write in the advertisement that you can lose weight with a specific product. Emphasis should be placed on how quickly the customer can get rid of those extra pounds and how safe it will be. Additionally, it can play that the product is made from natural products and allows you to lose weight without harm to health.
Conventionally, the text in creatives may look like this:
“- 5 kg in 7 days without harm to health. Proven effectiveness "
"Eat and lose weight, visible results in 7 days."
“Losing weight in record time. No harm to health and diets ”
etc.
Time of activity of the target audience. This point should be taken into account in order to determine the days and times of ad display. For example, users are most often interested in legal services on weekdays during working hours, but the activity of dating services can increase in the evening and on weekends, when people usually have more free time.
What else can help define the target audience
Seller research. Most often, advertisers have already done their own research and know exactly who their target customers are. When you receive an offer, you can see a description that will indicate who is included in the target audience in the following format: gender, age, geo.
These recommendations do not always work because not all companies are ready to spend money on massive research of their audience and its needs. But this information will not be superfluous.
Checking popularity of queries. You can check how popular your offer is in a specific city or country, from which devices most often users search for your offer, etc. For this use Wordstat, Google Trends or Audience Insights to check the popularity of your offer.
Such analytics will help in the future to determine the resource from which you will promote a specific offer.
See how similar campaigns work for other affiliates. With the help of special programs, you can view the statistics of specific offers that other affiliates use: which offers and creatives they use, what profit they get, etc. For example, Adspy or Adplexity will help you with this.
This is a great opportunity to both learn the mechanics of other affiliate marketers and learn from their mistakes.
The relevance of displaying on certain services. In addition to the restrictions on the subject of advertising content on some websites, sometimes it is simply inappropriate to place some offers on specific sites. For example, children's toys are unlikely to be appropriate for banners on sites that specialize in renovation or fishing
Run tests. If you are just starting to work in affiliate marketing, you cannot do without test periods. Analyze your experience and that of competitors and do not be afraid to experiment: by trial and error, you can choose your audience.
