Identifying your target audience is crucial in marketing. It might seem straightforward at first, but truly understanding a target audience for the purposes of advertising can require a bit of research. In this article, we explore the concept of a target audience, helping you to identify and market to yours!
What Does “Target Audience” Mean?
Target audience has a distinct meaning from target market, though the two are inextricably linked. A target market can be thought of as the whole demographic to whom a product or service might be of interest—i.e. all potential customers. A target audience, however, is a subsection or group from within that demographic, to whom a specific campaign or advert can be directed.
Target audiences are more specific, and are identified from the target market for communication and sale.
Can a Target Audience Be Everyone?
No, it should be more specific. For example, the target market for Coca-Cola is primarily 10–25-year-olds, with a secondary market made up of 25–40-year-olds. With such a broad demographic, it doesn’t always make sense to advertise to all members at all times. Therefore, it can be shrewd to create a specific campaign aimed at a certain target audience—for example, health-conscious people.
A campaign such as this could use a variety of techniques to make certain Coca-Cola products more appealing to those who want to look after their health. Now, this campaign would be distinct from one that focuses on the luxurious sugariness of traditional Coca-Cola, which could put health-conscious customers off the product.
So as you can see, both health-conscious and sugar-loving customers fall within the Coca-Cola target market, but they are not the same target audience. The same adverts would not appeal to each, and could even be unappealing—so figuring out a target audience and tailoring content to them is an important business strategy.
A target market encompasses all people who might buy a given product. A target audience is a particular subsection at whom adverts are aimed.
The Purpose of Knowing Your Target Audience
Identifying a clear target audience is important to creating effective and targeted campaigns that will reach those people most likely to respond. If you create content without knowing who you’re aiming it at, then you can’t know how best to tailor it, and you might end up missing people who would actually buy your product.
For instance, if you offer a product that sells mostly to people over 60, but you create ad campaigns exclusively on TikTok, it doesn’t matter how good the content is, you won’t benefit from it because your target audience will never receive it!
Knowing your target audience means that you can tailor content and adverts to those most likely to respond to them.
Target Audience Types
There are several easy ways to identify specific target audiences, helping you to narrow down campaigns and reach the right people. Below, find some broad categories that will help you.
Purchase Intention
Purchase intention refers to a group of people who currently intend to purchase the product or service you offer. For instance, people who need a new sofa. Now, not everyone who thinks they might want a new sofa fits into this category; rather, it’s the subset within this category who might follow this through to purchase.
Identifying customers based on purchase intent requires a good understanding of your target market, their behaviours, and also the general behaviours of people who buy similar products and services as those that you offer.
For example, far more people have purchase intent for Coca-Cola or other soft drinks compared to sofas, as they’re much cheaper and disposable. So targeting effectively requires you to understand the nature of your offerings and the barriers to making a purchase.
Interest
Figure out who’s actually interested. You can do this by performing research or using existing data, depending on how you operate.
Identifying who is interested in what you have to offer is key to even discovering your target market. But if you continue to delve into interest, you will identify specific reasons that individuals are interested in your products. The whole target market does not want your products for the same reasons.
Zeroing in on specific reasons helps you to identify distinct target audiences that you can then market to in specific ways.
Subcultures
Particular subcultures have different wants and respond to different stimuli. Even if a subculture falls within your target market, it may require very specific targeting in order to actually convert them into customers.
For instance, if you have a target market that includes both environmentally conscious people and people who are less concerned about the environment, then you’ll need to target each specifically. Understanding subcultures and their interests will help you connect to their particular needs and desires.
Demographics
Different demographics respond to different types of content and ads, and understanding this is important if you’re to effectively target them.
Demographics include:
- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Education level
- Income level
- Marital status
- Etc.
You can also combine demographics, and specifically target, say, single people of a certain age (if you’re a dating app, for example). In fact, in practice it’s usually important to mix demographics and identify the categories your target audiences fall into.
To continue the dating app example, you may know that young single people are your main target audience, but you can do better than this. Young single men will respond differently to young single women, and so the more you hone in on specific demographics, the more you can target certain groups.
Location
Finally, if you’re a business that is national or global, then you need to target audiences based on geography.
All of the above considerations come into play here too. You need to understand how certain groups in certain cultures behave, and be aware of any developments of important dates/periods in your target areas. For instance, in locations with high populations of Muslims, understanding Muslim festivals and celebrations will help you decide when to run campaigns. High season in one place might not be the same elsewhere.
Identifying and understanding which categories your target audiences fall into is key to properly targeting them.
Target Audience vs Target Market and Target Customers
You can think of target markets, audiences, and customers like an upside-down triangle.
At the top is the largest category: the target market. This is everyone who could buy your product/service.
In the middle is the target audience, an identified group with commonalities who you can actively target with ads and campaigns (for example, Spanish people).
At the bottom is the target customer: this is an outline of an individual who might buy your product. What does their life look like? What do they like, what do they need, what are their concerns? This is much more specific and personal than a target audience, and is becoming increasingly important in today’s world, where we have a large amount of individual data available.
A target market can be reduced to a target audience, and further still to a target customer.
How to Find Your Target Audience
But how do you ascertain a clear idea of who your target audience is? There are multiple methods you can use to research and identify a target audience. Below we will outline some of the most common and effective methods.
Asking Questions, Finding Answers
Ask questions. You can achieve this through focus groups, or you could survey existing customers or just random samples of the population.
You can also Google certain questions around your product, and see where they take you. What demographics are the answers aimed at? This might tell you something about your target audiences.
Using Social Media
Social media is an easy way to figure out who’s likely to care about your products. Search for relevant hashtags and see what kind of people turn up. Look at similar products and see who shows interest in them. What sort of influencers are advertising similar products, and who is their fanbase?
Creating Personas
You can create personas of the types of people you expect to be in your target audience, and in doing so can evaluate which categories they might fit into. This requires a bit of work, and the more you do it, the more likely it is to be accurate.
These personas are created based on archetypes, and group people into different categories based on their commonalities. Using a variety of research and analytic tools, you can use these personas to hone in on your main target audiences and customers.
Defining Who Isn’t Your Target Audience
Another tactic is to rule out those who are not part of your target audience. Say you have a new car that you want to sell; you can rule out the following groups—those who don’t drive, those who have no purchase intent for a new car, those who can’t afford your car, and those who fall into subcultures that are unlikely to like your car, and so on.
Often, ruling people out is a very good place to start, as it leaves you with a smaller group to hone in on further.
Reexamining
It’s also important to reexamine target audiences after you launch a campaign, and analytics tools can be very helpful for this. Check to see who engages with adverts, and who goes on to buy them. It may turn out that your ads only reached a very specific group within your target audience, which will tell you how to target them in the future, and what to do differently.
Reassessing and examining past campaigns is crucial to honing in more accurately in the future.
Target Audience Example
Before we finish, we’ll provide an example of a target audience.
Let’s return to the dating app example.
You know you’re targeting single people. And then, from this you can choose a smaller demographic, let’s say men between the ages of 20–25. Now, you can research this demographic to see what their interests are and which platforms they use, which will help you to actually reach them.
You can then design a campaign and release it on the most effective platforms, hopefully funnelling some of your audience towards becoming customers.
And then, you should reexamine the campaign. Did it work? Who actually responded? Did you miss people you expected to reach? What’s more, you should assess old campaigns and see how they relate to the current social climate, to get a feel for changes, helping you to evolve in an ever-shifting landscape.
Once you identify a target audience, you must get to know them so that you can appeal directly to them.
Improve the Impact of Your Marketing Efforts
Identifying and understanding your target audiences will help you to effectively campaign. This will both save you money and then make you money further down the line. A blanket approach may seem appealing at first, but you can sometimes end up missing everyone. It’s often better to reduce your target audience then try to appeal to them specifically.
