Target audience research: how to find out who your buyers are and why they buy

Target audience research answers three questions about the people you want to reach: who they are, what situation makes them look for something like your product, and where you can find them. Sales records, analytics and public data help with the first and third questions. The second, which usually decides whether your marketing and product land, mostly comes from talking to people.

This page is about describing an audience you already suspect exists. If you are still choosing between several possible customer groups, how to choose your first customer segment covers that decision first.

A worked example: guest messaging for small hotels

Suppose you sell a text-messaging tool that lets hotel front desks answer guest questions. This example is hypothetical and used throughout the page.

Your current description of the audience is "independent hotels." That names a market, but it does not tell you whom to interview, what to say in an ad or where to put it. Good research turns it into something closer to: "general managers of independent hotels with roughly 40 to 120 rooms, who cover the front desk themselves on short-staffed nights and already answer guest texts from a personal phone." Every part of that sentence should trace back to evidence, and any part that is still a guess should be labelled as one.

Start with the people who already buy

If you have customers, your own records are the most reliable evidence you have. Pull the last 20 or so customers who paid and note the job title of the person who signed, the size of the business, how they first heard of you and what they used before. Do the same for people who tried the product and did not buy. The differences between the two lists are often more useful than either list alone.

Website analytics add a partial view. Google Analytics' demographic details report shows visitors' age bracket, gender, interests, location and language. It includes only aggregated data from users who consent to sharing demographics, and Google may withhold data when user counts are low. Treat it as a description of some of your visitors, not of your buyers. For a B2B product, the age and interests of site visitors rarely tell you who approves a purchase.

Use public data to count and locate the audience

The SBA's market research guide suggests gathering demographic information such as population data on age, wealth, family and interests, and lists free federal sources, including Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. For a business audience, the equivalent is counts of businesses by industry and location, which the same page links through NAICS and the Census Business Builder.

Public data tells you how many people or businesses match a description and where they are. It cannot tell you which of them feel the problem your product solves. In the hotel example, you could count hotels by state, but not which general managers are answering texts on their own phones at midnight.

Interview to learn the situation and the words

Interviews fill the gap that data leaves: the situation that makes someone look for help, what they tried and the words they use for it. Nielsen Norman Group's guide to persona types recommends building audience descriptions from qualitative research, typically by interviewing 5 to 30 people in rolling groups of about 5 until each new interview adds little. It advises against descriptions built only from demographic or analytics data, because those lack the context of what people were trying to do and why.

Ask about a recent, specific event rather than general preferences. For the hotel example:

Tell me about the last night a guest needed something and nobody was at the desk. How did they reach you, what did you do, and what happened next?

Listen for who handled it, what tools they used, who else got involved and the exact phrases they chose. Those phrases are often better ad copy than anything you would write yourself.

Interview three groups if you can: current customers, people who looked at your product and chose something else, and people who match your description but have never heard of you. The last group is the hardest to reach and the most likely to show you whether your description is too narrow or too broad. How to find customers to interview covers where to look, and customer interview questions has more question wording.

Write the audience description with its evidence

Once you have a round of interviews, write the description as a short table. Mark each line with where the evidence came from, so the team can see which parts are solid.

A line supported only by your team's opinion is an assumption. That is fine as a starting point, but keep it visibly separate from what people told you or what records show.

Check how common the description is

Interviews tell you what the audience looks like, not what share of the market it represents. Once the description is clear, a survey or a small ad test can estimate how many people match it. NN/g notes that turning survey data into statistically clustered personas needs at least 100 respondents, ideally 500 or more, plus someone who can do the statistical analysis, and that a qualitative approach is the right balance for most teams. Interviews vs. surveys explains when each fits, and market research methodologies covers the wider set of methods.

Your next step

Write your current audience description in one sentence, then list which parts come from evidence and which are guesses. Pick the biggest guess and schedule five conversations to test it.

If the people you need to hear from are professionals outside your network, Instant Expert can find people who match a description you write, such as "general managers of independent hotels who also cover the front desk." You review who it finds, it sends your invitations, and you pay only for calls that get booked. The directory pages for hospitality operations professionals and hospitality marketing professionals are one place to start.