Target Audience Analysis Techniques

my competitor and i launched identical linkedin campaigns. same budget, same audience, same product category. i crushed him 8:1 on deal conversion. he was confident going into the test. better product. stronger brand recognition. more funding. bigger team. we both targeted VPs of sales at 500+ person companies. same demographic criteria. same ad creative quality. $10K budget each. month one results: me: 47 deals closed. him: 6 deals closed. he was convinced i got lucky with better prospects. "let me see your targeting strategy," he asked. i pulled up my dashboard. "i don't target demographics at all." "what do you mean? you're running linkedin ads." "i target behaviors." i showed him my approach: instead of job titles, i track content consumption. instead of company size, i monitor website journeys. instead of industry filters, i watch engagement patterns. "i built an audience of people who've consumed competitor content in the last 30 days. downloaded sales automation guides. attended webinars about pipeline management. visited pricing pages of tools like ours." my "audience" wasn't demographic. it was behavioral. "linkedin lets you upload custom audiences," i explained. "i upload lists of people who've shown buying behavior. then i target those lists with ads." he was targeting people who might need our product. i was targeting people actively shopping for our product. "how do you identify buying behavior?" he asked. "third-party intent data. website pixel tracking. content engagement scoring. competitor analysis tools." i showed him my process: week 1: identify companies researching sales tools. week 2: find individuals at those companies consuming content. week 3: build custom audiences from behavioral data. week 4: launch ads to pre-qualified prospects. "demographics tell you who someone is," i said. "behavior tells you what they're doing." he was advertising to VPs of sales. i was advertising to VPs of sales currently shopping for solutions. same title, completely different mindset. my prospects were already in buying mode. his were just scrolling linkedin. the conversion difference made perfect sense. he rebuilt his entire approach: behavioral targeting instead of demographic filtering. intent data instead of job title assumptions. shopping behavior instead of profile characteristics. next month's results for him: 52 deals closed. 9x improvement over his original campaign. the lesson was clear: demographics describe who people are. behavior reveals what people need. target the behavior.

Don’t start the SEO process with keyword research. Instead, start with audience research. Go deep to understand your target audience and their goals, thoughts, challenges, and frustrations. HOW? ✅ We typically spend time interviewing the client marketing team, salespeople, CEO, and product managers. ✅ We interview our client’s customers. (We LOVE this! They typically have super compelling stories to tell!) ✅ We ask for sales call recordings. (Sometimes we'll spend 15-20 hours just on these alone!) ✅ We review our client’s sales decks. ✅ We review the content that the audience is consuming online. ✅ When appropriate, we conduct a survey to the CRM database. (Or rely on our client’s customer surveys.) ✅ We walk through the customer journey ourselves, identifying obstacles in the process. ✅ We also do a competitive analysis. By COMBINING audience insights with keyword insights, your SEO & Content program becomes wholly customer-centric, resonates more deeply with your audience members, and drives greater rates of action. ------------------------------------------- Let’s Destroy Mediocre Marketing! 👋 Follow me (Tom Shapiro) for more B2B marketing content like this! ♻️ Repost to spread the word. #b2bmarketing #seo #b2bseo

The most underrated element in your B2B paid campaigns is your audience targeting. It's the foundation of every successful campaign — and it's the cheat code to driving higher quality leads. Instead of wasting hours creating more & more ad creative and ad copy, first ask yourself if you've maximized every possible audience available. My R.I.T.E Audience Framework helps break this down: 1️⃣ (R) Retargeting Audiences This is your warmest audience set. Max out this audience as much as possible by leveraging all available audiences based on a 30, 60, or 90-day timeframe including: All website visitors All pricing, demo, trial & case study visits All single-image ad interactions All 25-97% video viewers All company page visitors All document ad interactions All conversation ad opens All past event attendees All lead gen form opens (exclude lead gen form submissions though) All meeting no-shows & qualified leads that went dark without taking a meeting All closed lost contacts 2️⃣ (I) ICP Audiences These are your cold audiences filtered by industry, geography, and job titles to find your ideal customer profile. Spend some good time here. To help zero-in on the best ICP criteria, export a list of contacts from your CRM from your best-fit customers. Make a list of decision makers, champions, and influencers to define which job titles should see which specific ads. I encourage you to work with your sales team to refine this to avoid wasting ad spend on bad titles that will be disqualified later. Review this ~1x a month. There's tons of other data sources you can upload & layer on native criteria to. Here's just a few examples: Cold audiences from your current tech stack (CRM, MAP, Zoominfo, Apollo) Intent Audiences (G2, Bombora, CommonRoom, 6Sense) Website visitor contacts (RB2B, Warmly, Qualified) Technographic Audiences (Metamatch, Aberdeen, BuiltWith) Job Change Audiences (UserGems, LinkedIn Sales Nav) Funding Change Audiences (CrunchBase, KeyPlay) 3️⃣ (T) Target Account Audiences These are specific accounts you want to target. Don't sleep on this audience. Put your sales team on speed dial for this one so you can all align on the right-to-win accounts to target with ads. Layer on as much relevant filter criteria to target the right personas at these accounts. Review this ~1-2 months with your sales team. 4️⃣ (E) Exclusion Audiences Think of this as your "anti-buyer" persona. Exclude anyone you don’t want to waste ad spend on. Make it a habit to review your campaign's demographic reports to make sure you're not burning money on irrelevant audiences. Here's a few audiences I highly recommend excluding: Thank you & career website page visits All lead gen form submits Your company All existing customers All competitors & partners Poor fit job titles or functions (proactively add here based on disqualified lead feedback from your sales team) Poor fit industries Irrelevant company sizes Disqualified leads Target smarter, not harder. 🚀

I often say: Focus on psychographics (values, interests) Over demographics (age, gender, income) The tough part? Gathering psychographics (without being creepy or invasive.) It's easier to rely on demographics. They're: - painless to gather - straightforward - easy to analyze - quantifiable But it's a mistake to depend on them. A costly one. They're a weak data point. The role they play in purchase decisions? Smaller than many marketers think. Psychographics are much more useful. And easier to collect than you think. Here's how I do it: 👉 Customer surveys Ask direct questions about values, interests, and the purchase process. 👉 Social listening Analyze what your audience is saying in comments, reviews, and posts. Look for patterns in their language, pain points, and values. 👉 Website behavior Track which pages customers visit, what content they engage with, and how they navigate your site. 👉 Customer interviews Understand the customer buying process — from the first moment a customer noticed a problem in their life through purchasing your product (and ideally your product solving their problem). 👉 Community engagement Host webinars, engage in online groups, read and respond to customer comments. Learn your target market's pain points and how they phrase those pain points. 👉 Analyze reviews and testimonials Look for recurring themes in what people say about your product — or your competitors'. Psychographics give you: - customer behavior insights - voice-of-customer data - value props - pain points It's priceless info. Use it to hone your messaging, offers, marketing, design, and product. #marketing #customerinsights #strategy

We often audit LinkedIn ad accounts spending from €5k-€100K+/month. The three most important things we look at across them all are: 1. Audience + Targeting 2. Creative + Copy Strategy 3. Account Technical Setup → Audience + Targeting First, we'll look at your audience strategy, because: ‘𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘢𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨’. There are 2 components to this: 1. Strategically: have you chosen the right people to target? 2. Tactically: are you set up correctly to target the people you’ve chosen? At LinkedIn, for years we used an internal tool called ‘Supertitles’, which was essentially a map/directory of how LinkedIn targeting maps together. Now, as an agency, we don’t have access anymore, but after 7 years of using it, we've learned how to easily spot where accounts are going wrong. We use LinkedIn’s new ‘Companies’ feature to analyse all the Companies/Industries you’ve reached with BOTH paid and organic impressions. We’ll also connect your account to our tools audience reporting tools (Windsor.ai + Looker), which we use to create custom dashboards and analyse LinkedIn data beyond Campaign Manager’s 25-row limitation. This setup allows us to review a ranking of: All Job Titles reached/engaged All Companies reached/engaged This allows us to recommend excluding unwanted titles/companies or redistributing the budget so that larger segments/companies aren’t taking all the budget. → Creative Strategy Second we look at creative because: ‘𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘴 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯’. But what does that mean? Well, if you have great creative with high CTR’s/Eng rates, LinkedIn will reward you with far more impressions and far cheaper results, so much so that you can use various settings and bidding types and still get great performance. We'll show you what a great creative + copy strategy looks like i.e. -      Great concepts: ways to visualise your USP/pain -      Great formatting: formats to use and avoid -      Clarity: how to get your message across -      CTAs: being prominent and action-based -      Copy: getting the value across before the cut-off -      Ad Types: which are hot vs not right now. 3. Account Technical Setup Finally, we’ll tell you what’s needed to get to an advanced level of technical setup, in short, we'll: → Identify all your ‘don’ts’ → Tell you all the ‘do’s’ We also use 3rd-party tools like Linklo.io, ChatGPT + other integrations to enhance LinkedIn's native functionality and run custom reports. With these tools, we can advise on and implement some of the things that LinkedIn can’t do like: → Scheduling → Budget capping → Custom CPC/CPL analysis -- Hopefully, this is helpful and if you're spending $5k+ p/m and want a second pair of eyes. Drop me a message. #linkedinads