Your target audience is the exact set of consumers who are most likely to want your product or service, and thus the ones who should see your advertising efforts. Age, gender, wealth, location, interests, and a variety of other criteria can all influence the target audience.

Your target audience may be limited or broad depending on what you sell. If you were a shoe retailer, for example, your intended audience would be diverse because men, women, and children all wear shoes. On the other side, maybe you specialise in high-performance running shoes. Then your target group would be more specific – professional athletes aged 20 to 40 who have expressed interest in running or have completed a marathon.

In either case, it is essential to define and categorise your target demographic in order to identify the creative messaging that will engage with them and the channels they prefer.

Target Audience Examples

The target audience is a defined general set of people. Such individuals may be men, women, youths, or children. They typically share a common interest, such as reading, exercising, or playing soccer. Marketers might use personas to research appropriate magazine titles or trade publications.

The Advantages of Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is critical as a marketer. This data will be the basis for any advertising plan and strategy you implement. Airing an ad during the Pro Bowl may appear to be a terrific method to reach quite so many people as possible, but it’s also costly. However, just one-quarter of the viewers are likely to be interested in your product. Understanding that your target demographic reads a particular magazine or watches a particular show implies that your ad will be viewed by fewer people, but by the correct people. If you sell running shoes, for example, advertisements in running periodicals may be a perfect choice for your target audience.

The Distinction Between a Target Audience and a Target Market

A target market is a group of consumers to whom an organization intends to sell or reach through marketing operations. A target audience is the individuals or part of a target market to which ads are given. As a result, the target audience becomes a more specialised subdivision of a target market.

To return to the running shoe case, let’s say your target market is marathon runners, but you’re offering a special at your London location. The target audience for a sale ad would be prospective London Marathon runners, not all marathon runners.

Because it is a specified subdivision of the largest market group, target audience and target market are frequently interchangeable. However, target market is not always equivalent with target audience.

Target audience types

Because these will correlate with the focus of your marketing activities and your goals, your business might have a variety of target audiences. In some marketing campaigns, you may need to be extremely particular. If you own a landscaping company, this could mean focusing on all of your consumers in one town with a single event or discount to increase your client base in that one location.

Here are a couple such examples:

Email: You may send out a newsletter with tips to your broad target audience, nurture email flows to leads, and/or trigger emails to existing clients.

Event: You may host an event for the community members, like in the landscaping company example, or one for potential clients. You might even host an event for present or prospective customers or partners.

Community: You may run a Slack or Discord group that links prospective customers in similar roles, or a community that digital ordering who use your product.

Ad: You may run Facebook ads encouraging repeat business, Google ads aimed at prospects looking for a solution, or Popular Instagram ads aimed at your competitors’ customers.

Social media: You could post a thought leadership piece geared at users who would share it, a how-to video for your target users, or host a series of interviews with personalities significant to your audience—whether they be novelists, stars, or experts.

How to Find Your Target Market

If you’re not positive who your target audience is—whether for your overall branding, a single marketing channel, or a specific campaign—you must take a step back to figure it out. Examine at who is engaged with your product, brand, and marketing to discover who your target audience is. Here’s how it’s done:

Customers should be interviewed.

Examine your social following

Have a look at your marketing performance figures.

Create a list of your competitors.

Identify who your target just isn’t.

1. Begin with your customers

Your consumers are the ones who are using your product or service, so clearly your offering’s positioning, the answer you presented, your marketing, or a mix of these works. That is why this is a great place to start.

First, consider your consumers’ demographics: what their job descriptions are, where they reside, and how old they are. Are you sensing any trends as you go? Maintain an eye out for patterns with your loyal, returning consumers. Then look for trends in your one-time customers. It’s also a great time to question about where your clients are using their time and solicit advice. Is it a particular Instagram influencer, an industry newsletter, or a reputable business blog? These consumer insights are important data points to have because they enable you to choose these channels for marketing.

2. Analyse your social media followers

Your social fans are an additional existing audience to which you can examine to determine who your present advertising is appealing. Moreover, it provides insight into the consumers who are really interested in your business. As per Sprout Social, the most frequent reasons individuals follow brands on social media are to gain discounts, keep up to date on commercial media, and learn about new products or services.

You won’t have the same level of access to your social media followers as you have to your clients. If you must conduct an interview, make it a brief survey with very targeted questions. Alternatively, pay attention to demographics and behaviour.

Here are some things to think about:

Location

Age

Career

household earnings

Activity level

Additional brand loyalty

Once more, you should keep a close eye to those users who interact with your social media profiles the most. The best part is that you can analyse this data using a tool, even one that is free. For instance, Buffer provides a free tier as well.

3. Analyze your content analytics

Your website visitors are the next existent audience that needs some research. Who is already reading your content? Who is accessing your reports for download? Who is watching your videos and how?

The obvious place to begin when looking for this kind of data is Google Analytics. You can discover:

• Demographics – View the profile of your users by city and country of residence.
• From where users are coming – Is Twitter a major source of recommendations? Is it a specialised industry news website? a certain blogger? This gives you with more details about where to focus your marketing efforts.
• Which topics appeal to them – Your website’s users’ likes and disinterests can reveal information about your target audience and how to attract to them.
• Which search terms people are using – Learn whatever people are searching for on Google that drove them to your website.

4. Analyze your competitors

You face opposition. You have competition regardless of your offering, target market, or product. You can utilise them as well. Look at the audience that your competitor is marketing to. Where are they placing their ads? Facebook? Twitter or Instagram? Who are they trying to reach with their ads? What issues are they emphasising?

Create a target audience for them by examining their message, marketing, and brand, then compare it to yours to discover where the pair converge and where they diverge. You might see the difference and overlap better together. You’ll be able to describe the distinction of your brand more effectively. You want to determine which of the audiences that your rivals are targeting is actively interacting with their content in addition to the audiences that they are targeting. Examine their social media followers to similarly spot the similarities and differences.

5. Define your guidelines

You must identify who your customer isn’t in this final phase, which might also seem to be an anomaly in the procedure overall. Consider the competitive ad from Monday.com. The team made it very obvious who their target audience is and isn’t. They don’t cater to people searching for a straightforward, cost-free Kanban solution.

Therefore, for this phase, examine all of your data, including your customer interviews, your social media following, your website visitors, and the comparable audiences of your competitors. Then decide which gaps you most surely do not fill.

Are you a pet shop without any aquariums for reptiles? Iguana owners are not in your target market.

Are there boozy shakes for sale? Even if it’s difficult to tell from your photographs, you’re not aiming to attract anyone who is younger than 21.

Can you solely accommodate U.K. clients? Then anyone working outside of those restrictions is not your target audience.

Setting your objectives will help direct your marketing efforts and even your business strategy.

Although it’s essential, knowing who your target market is in detail is not the last step. You must make absolutely sure that everyone on your team is aware of these features if you want your marketing to be more successful. Thus, once you have this definition, spread it widely so that everyone your business targets can be served.

Additionally, there may be applications for things that haven’t been conceived of. Some of these missed opportunities can be discovered by combining target audiences and analytics technologies in order to better take advantage of them.