Defining Your Target Market

To successfully market a product/service, you must develop a marketing plan that identifies your target audience. This can be achieved by creating a buyer persona — a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and research (Express, 2023). To create a comprehensive buyer profile, data should be obtained around geographic, demographic, and psychographic characteristics. This article provides tools to create a buyer profile.

Industry Category Research

Take the industry category your product/service falls into and perform research — this will provide a wide variety of characteristics about who your primary customers likely are, so you can build a buyer persona. Additionally, these resources provide valuable data on competitors and competition levels, barriers to entry, market concentration, volatility, and market value, volume, and forecasts. Three research tools:

• Global Data Explorer (GlobalData, n.d.)
• IBISWorld (IBIS World, n.d.)
• Statista (Statista, 2024)

Competitor Follower Base

Look at the major players in your industry category and do a quick social media follower count inventory, for all of the networks they market on. See which networks have the largest follower base. Most likely, the largest players have the most followers on the same network(s). Now that you have isolated the network they leverage the most, perform research (using the above list) for that network’s user base.

For example, Instagram’s primary user base include both men and women between the ages of 29-44 (37%), those who report ‘high income’ classification (38%), have partners (37%), and live in a large city (29%). 50% of channel users express ‘food and dining’ as a prevalent interest and 39% in ‘health and fitness’. Additionally, 43% state ‘cooking/baking’ and 37% call ‘shopping’ a hobby and leisure activities. (Social media: Instagram users in the United States, 2025). Each network will have it’s own user characteristics and will provide very specific details to help you shape your buyer persona.

You could then run a paid social media campaign to learn deeper insights about users, by utilizing the data from the platform’s advertising analytics. Implementing a paid social media campaign can also create unique opportunities to increase visibility to your primary target audience, while strengthening social media engagement, and increasing brand awareness.

Internal Stakeholders

Don’t discount the value your internal stakeholders can provide when defining a buyer persona or creating your marketing plan. The function of internal stakeholders is to ensure that the brand’s mission is achieved — your marketing strategy should resonate with stakeholders but must also be customer-focused. When implementing your marketing plan, the characteristics, behaviors, needs, and perceptions of internal stakeholders should always be considered (Wheeler & Meyerson, 2024).

Marketing Plan Development

Positioning a brand creates the perception of a brand in the customers mind to where it can achieve differentiation, which is vital to successfully marketing your product/service and consequently shapes a brand’s financial performance (Duber-Smith, Schofield & Baker 2023). Defining a detailed buyer persona is an important part of developing a comprehensive and well-researched marketing plan.

References

Duber-Smith, D., Schofield, A., & Baker, B. (2023). The Three B’s of Branding: Applying the Brand Evolution Process in Marketing Classes. American Journal of Management, 23(5), 49–61. https://doi.org/10.33423/ajm.v23i5.6739

Express, A. (2023, November 14). How to create a buyer persona in four steps (+ free templates & examples). www.adobe.com. https://www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/buyer-persona

Social media: Instagram users in the United States. (2025). Statista. https://www.statista.com/study/72705/social-media-instagram-users-in-the-united-states/

Statista. (2024). Statista. https://www.statista.com/homepage

Wheeler, A., & Meyerson, R. (2024). Designing Brand Identity (6th ed.). Wiley Professional Development (P&T). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781119984825