Understanding target market analysis.
Target analysis is usually helpful for using marketing funds more efficiently. It helps you analyze your audience and identify important characteristics about them. This is useful in promoting products or services. An excellent target market analysis bridges the gap between producer and consumer and also increases product sales and services. The first step for compiling data for a target market analysis is by identifying those in need of your products. This makes advertisement easier. The goal of carrying out target market analysis is to increase overall profits and focus market resources.
You may need to study your clients’ emotions, beliefs, and values. This information can be found through surveys and focus groups. And it tells us why people buy what they do, the type of entertainment they engage in, their beliefs, hobbies. And why they don’t return to a particular store. Demographic information carried out during target market analysis includes their marital status, age, income, gender, family size. Also race, educational level, occupation, etc. This information is available online. If you are marketing to another business. Demographic data should entail their business location, the number of staff, number of branches, industry, etc.
Definition of target market analysis
Mike Kappel, defines target market analysis as valuable information about costumers. Needed before starting a business, to ensure its growth and survival.
A target market, or target audience, is the pool of customers to whom you want to sell your products or services potentially. Your target market is not everyone who located in your business’s area. It’s only made up of the people who are good fits for your products. You want to figure out which fish in the ocean you’re going to focus on catching. For example, let’s look at one of my companies, Top Echelon. At Top Echelon, we create and sell recruiting software. Our target market is not all businesses in the world. Instead, we focus on marketing to recruiting agencies.
Understanding the behavioural pattern. Target market analysis will help you figure out why a client may choose a product or service over the other. It also gives information about the particular reason why consumers buy a product. How many they purchased or how long it took them to make the decision. Every target market analysis differs, and when writing yours, you should make sure to include the introduction. Which defines the size of your target market and identifies the industry. The title page should be clear enough to generate readers interest and tell what the analysis is all about. Visual representation, i.e., like charts, pictures and graphs also make the report more appealing.
What is keyword competition
Keyword competition in target market analysis has to do with the level of competitiveness of a particular keyword. It is the standard of difficulty associated with ranking a keyword to make it come top in search engine ranking. Most people are overwhelmed when they think of search engines and how they operate. But SEO is not as complicated as it may seem and your competitors are your allies. A good number of people have no idea how to go about finding and selecting keywords. That provide the best possible search experience for users.
Neil Patel believes you have to take into account your entire competitive landscape. To know how difficult, it would be to rank for a particular keyword.
“Keyword competition analysis is the process of evaluating how the top rankings fare. when it comes to the most important SEO factors, including their use of specific keywords.”
The process of selecting such relevant keywords is through keyword research. To find the keywords. The internet marketer must take into account how competitive the target keywords are. And also consider ROI gotten by targeting a particular keyword. Most times the competitiveness of a keyword can be determined by its overall popularity and the competition within the industry. If you find yourself in a niche where few people are aware of SEO. Or where your competitors are not interested in targeting the same keyword as you. That puts you in the best position to outrank everybody and target low competition keywords while using limited resources. Having the power of knowing your consumer’s keywords strengthens your sales funnel and increases your click through rate. It also gives you a competitive advantage.
Why do you need competitor analysis?
Every business has competitors, and competitor analysis reports will keep you one step ahead of yours. A competitor analysis provides a detailed financial analysis of each of your rivals. Not only that, but the online sorting options will allow you to confirm known competitors and identify new ones. Target market analysis gives you the facility to benchmark all your prominent rivals. And study the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. You can benchmark the performance of your competitor and compare them to your company averages. Your competition may come from companies that offer similar products or businesses that provide a different service from yours. But still target your customer to provide them with a proposition that could be better than yours.
Most startups sometimes created by employees of existing companies often see the possibility of capitalizing on loopholes. And improving on existing services from their experience. Having a comprehensive competitor analysis keeps you one step ahead of the competition. And allow you make decisions of facts and recent information rather than speculations. Your competitor analysis will never work unless you make accurate reports about your company’s statistical data and various relevant references. Draft your primary opponent’s strengths and weaknesses in a tabulated manner which compares against your business’s vital stats.
Gather Your Competitors SEO Data and Strategy
The aim of target market analysis is to collect all the data necessary. And have a detailed view of your competitive landscape. Putting your focus on your direct competition is the smartest thing to do. The number of resources available is a deciding factor to whether you want to compete against the top players. To find the heavy hitters in your niche, you can carry out a simple google search. By putting in your niche keywords into the search bar.
Copy the top results and organic results into a spreadsheet.
And change the variations of your search term to pull out more competitors. Carrying out a google search will display the biggest players in your niche. To identify the softer competitors, plug in your website into Alexa or similar Web. Click on similar sites, and it would display your competitors running websites that are identical to yours. Now you have identified your competitors you have to pull out the key metrics. Like the domain authority, new referring domain and link sources that are linking back to the site. This information is vital to tell the rate at which your competition is acquiring new link. And from where the links are coming. An ideal tool for this is Ahrefs, and it offers a free trial.
The competitor’s website will give you information about their claims of services, financial stability, and reviews. Only gather data relevant to the strategy you need. When reporting the data make an effort to highlight your company’s pros and cons as well as your competitors. Tabulate your data so your readers can easily understand it. You can also make use of graphs and charts to communicate better with your audience. Also, endeavor to highlight the positive remarks about your business.
Benefits of Competitive Auditing
A competitive audit helps you track your competitors and what makes them more visible to search engines. Discovering this can guide you to improve your strategies to gain a competitive advantage in target market analysis. Looking at how much influence your competitors have on social media i.e. Twitter can help you work on your strategies. Competitive auditing can teach you valuable ways to position your brand. And you can also learn marketing and persuasive techniques.
Neil Patel’s opinion about competitive auditing is that it helps us find what our customers want and beat the competition.
Marcus Sheridan, of the sale lion, struggled to grow his swimming pool business until he realized, through competitor analysis. That most companies don’t give customers what they wanted. He realized that prospects didn’t just want a swimming pool. But advice on how to save money on it, use and maintain it. He made it his business to provide top quality information to his target audience. And his company and he became super successful, with a strong voice in the content marketing industry.
This strategy can be very useful to bring back lost customers back to the business through retargeting. A useful target market analysis is needed in many areas of study as well as in different business industries. Statistics and proof are what competitive auditing are all about. Statistics through figures, charts, recent surveys, relevant studies, and testimonials are what interests’ readers and audiences more. They also show that you made careful study during your target market analysis. And did not just make it up to prove your point.
Reasons for competitive auditing
There are many reasons why competitive auditing can help you. Here are some noteworthy reasons
To win your case: Any author of a competitive audit aims to win or to prove that his competitors are inferior to him. There may be many reasons for a competitive audit but there is only one goal, and that is to win. Your ideas and results will be formally presented to emphasize your point concretely.
To start a change: While some competitive auditing aims to show how better or how more productive his company is. There are also competitive audits that would like to demonstrate how the company is failing compared to the nearest competitor. The aim is to elicit change in management, procedures, and policies to be able to match the closest competitor.
To develop a USP: Whether you’re a public speaker blogger or digital marketer. Knowing your competition gives you an opportunity to target the right market and attract customers to your business. And every business needs a unique selling proposition(USP). Most potential clients may not believe the products and services listed on your site. Having a unique selling proposition builds trust and improves branding.
Understanding your competition
Understanding who you are competing against is the most important step in target market analysis. The fundamental criteria to base your finding are identifying your target market and what problems you can solve for them. For a successful social media campaign, you need to research on the website of your competitors. And this will help you identify the market share in your audit report.
Some of the competitive audit tools that are quite useful are:
Quick Sprout: This tool reveals internal factors to get organic traffic and ranking. And it also analyzes up to 3 competitor sites.
Alexa: This helps in carrying out target market analysis and understanding target audience. It also reveals how sites rank in particular countries and their audience demographics.
SEMrush: This tool gives data on competitor’s URL and real-time traffic. It also provides reliable live data on organic keywords.
Ahrefs: This is a very simple tool to use to find your competitor’s inbound link. It is a backlink research tool and can be used to improve your cooperate governance.
Open link profiler: This reveals the industry, influence, number of powerful backlinks of a particular competitor.
Google Keyword Planner: This is a simple keyword research tool.
KW Finder: Powerful long tail keyword finder with competitor site SEO analytics.
Majestic: This is used to check the source of backlinks and IP domain names for a given URL.
Buzzsumo: This comes in handy to check the popularity of a particular keyword in social media space. And how many people are sharing it on their posts.
Open site Explorer: This reveals the page authority and domain authority of a particular domain name. And also, functional for backlink research and analysis.
With the tools listed above identifying and understanding your competitor’s weakness and strengths are easy. And this gives you an opportunity to gain competitive advantage.
Long tail keyword much better than short keyword
The KW Finder is a very helpful tool for the keyword research, and track the monthly search trends.
Carrying out keyword research is essential in getting a clearer picture of your competitor’s online strategy. You can use the findings from your research to uncover content strategy and optimize your target market analysis. The best way to discover viable long tail keywords from your competitors is by the use of KW Finder. It shows you how your competitors are driving traffic to their websites. And how you can implement this in your auditing standards by targeting the same keywords. Find smaller target audience for the better conversation. You need to know anything about your customers (subgroups of your customers)
