How to Find Your Target Audience | Marketing Evolution (2024)

The buying process is in the hands of the customer, and marketers must create targeted, personalized experiences for people if they want to be the one to grab their attention among a sea of brands and advertisers. When marketers have a comprehensive understanding of their ideal buyer, they can make more informed decisions about media, messaging, and timing. Let’s take a look at exactly what a target audience is, and the steps you can take to find yours:

What Is a Target Audience?

Your target audience refers to the specific group of consumers most likely to want your product or service, and therefore, the group of people who should see your ad campaigns. Target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests or a myriad of other factors.

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Depending upon what you sell, your target audience might be niche or broader. For example, if you were a shoe vendor your target audience would be broad, since men, women and children all wear shoes. On the other hand, perhaps you specifically sell high-performance running shoes. Then, your target audience would be more niche – elite athletes between the ages of 20-40 who have expressed an interest in running, or have run a marathon. Either way, it is important to define and segment your target audience in order to determine the creative messaging that will resonate with them, and pinpoint the channels they prefer.

Examples of a Target Audience

Target audiences center around a specific group of people. These can be men, women, teenagers, or children. They generally share an interest such as reading, running, or soccer. Personas can help advertisers investigate relevant magazine titles or industry publications.

The Benefits of Knowing Your Target Audience

As a marketer, understanding your target audience is vital. This information will define everymarketing plan and strategyyou execute. Airing an ad during the Super Bowl might seem like a great way to be seen by as many people as possible, but it is also expensive. Furthermore, only a quarter of the viewers would actually be interested in your product. Knowing that your target audience reads a certain publication or watches a certain show means that your ad will be seen by fewer people, but the right people. For example if you sell running shoes, ads in running magazines may be a better fit for your target audience. Selecting the right media is essential for achievingmarketing ROIon your efforts.

In addition to increasing ROI, understanding your target market allows you to build relationships and better communicate with consumers. You can develop creative that speaks to specific personas, and develop brands that coincide with the interests and values of those most likely to purchase the product. This is especially important at a time where consumers expect every ad to be personalized and highly targeted. In fact,80 percentof consumers say they are more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized interactions.

What Are the Types of Target Audiences?

Target audiences can be segmented further into categories that reference, intent, location, interests, and more. Let’s take a look at examples of ways that you can break up your target audience:

Interest

Separate groups out based on their various interests, including hobbies and entertainment preferences. This can help you make data-driven, highly personalized messaging that allows you to connect with your audience in meaningful ways that can help drive brand loyalty.

Purchase Intention

Define groups of people who are looking for a specific product, such as a new entertainment system or car. This will help you understand your audience’s pain points so you can create tailored messaging that addresses their needs.

Subcultures

Subcultures refer to groups of people who share a common experience, such as music genres or entertainment fandoms. By understanding some of your target audience’s motivations, you can better understand who you’re trying to connect with.

The Difference Between Target Audience and Target Market

A target market is the set of consumers that a company plans to sell to or reach with marketing activities. A target audience is the group or segment within that target market that is being served advertisem*nts. This makes the target audience a more specific subset of a target market.

To go back to the running shoe example, your target market is marathon runners, but say you are having a deal at your Boston location. The target audience for an ad promoting the sale would be prospective runners in the Boston Marathon, not all marathon runners.

Target audience can often be used interchangeably with target market, as it is a specific subset of the largest market group. However, target market does not always mean target audience.

Understanding the Roles of Your Target Audience

An important step in understanding your target audience is to go beyond learning their demographic information, and understand what role they play in the path to purchase. These roles can often be divided into the following categories:

The Decision Maker: This is the person who ultimately makes the purchase decision. In some cases, the decision-maker is the same as the supporter, but in other cases they are different. When different, you must acknowledge this and gear ads to the decision- maker. Take, for example, the transformation of the Old Spice brand in 2010. The brand wanted to revamp their product to appeal to a younger generation. While researching, the team discovered that while men may ultimately wear their product, women were making the purchases, leading their creative team to focus on this target audience.

The Supporter: The supporter may not have the power to make the decision, but they will have a heavy influence on whether or not an item gets bought. For example, a child may not directly make a purchase, but if they want something for Christmas, they influence that decision. This is why it is important to develop messaging that speaks to consumers in both of these roles.

7 Ways to Determine Your Target Audience

To determine your target audience, you must spend time analyzing the data you receive from consumer engagements, evaluating current buyers and purchase trends and optimizing as new information is revealed.

The following steps should help you realize your target audience:

1. Analyze Your Customer Base and Carry Out Client Interviews

One of the best ways to determine who your target audience is to look at who already buys your product or service. How old are they, where do they live, what are their interests? A good way to learn this is through engaging on social or distributing customer surveys.

2. Conduct Market Research and Identify Industry Trends

Look at themarket researchfor your industry to determine where there are holes in service that your product can fill. Look at trends for similar products to see where they are focusing efforts, then hone in further on your products unique value.

3. Analyze Competitors

Marketers can learn a lot by looking at competitors to see who they are commonly selling to, and how they go about it. Are they using online oroffline channels? Are they focusing on the decision maker or the supporter?

4. Create Personas

Creating personas is a great way to drill down into the specific segments that make up your target audience.This is especially helpful if you have a product that appeals to a wide swath of consumers. Personas allow you to determine the general demographics, personalities and needs of your target consumers. The persona of “Fran First-Time Runner” will speak to different needs than “Sam Seasoned Pro.” Personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from to give a more complete view of the buyers. This might include favorite hobbies, television shows, publications, etc. It is recommended that marketers develop between three and five personas.

5. Define Who Your Target Audience Isn’t

There will certainly be consumers who are close to your target demographic, but who will not act on messaging. Try to be specific in determining who your audience is and who it isn’t. Is your demographic women, or women between the ages of 20 and 40? Knowing this will keep your teams from devoting ad dollars to segments that will not yield returns.

6. Continuously Revise

As you gather more data and interact with customers, you will get an increasingly accurate understanding of your target audiences. Based on this information, you must constantly optimize and hone personas to achieve the best results.

7. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers extensive data about the users visiting your site. This information can be leveraged to determine key insights such as what channels your target audience is coming from or what type of content they’re engaging and connecting with the most, allowing you to make more data-driven decisions during the media planning process.

How to Create Target Personas with The Right Demographics

We’ve already established that creating personas can be another great way to understand audiences. Market research paired with client interviews can give you better insights into what your clients read, think and value. This offers important understanding into which sources your audience uses and trusts. When building these out, consider using the following demographics and identifiers:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Hobbies
• Income
• Education level
• Profession
• Marital status
• Who they trust
• What they read/watch

Additionally, look into the following:

• Your current customer base
• Who your competitors are targeting

How to Reach Your Target Audience

Once you’ve created personas, the next step is to find media that targets these specific segments. Below are some tools to get you started:

Media Kits

Media kits from publishers give a clear idea of the audience segments they reach. These can be broken down by job titles, income levels or hobbies depending on the brand. When selecting where to invest ad dollars, marketers should ensure that secondary audiences aren’t included in these totals. For example, magazines are often passed along to friends and family. This long shelf life is beneficial for marketers, but should not be included when deciding on where to buy as they are estimates. Use the paid subscribers when making decisions or negotiating on cost.

Nielsen Ratings

Using statistical samplings, Nielsen is able to predict how many households view a certain show. Although prime time may seem like a great bet to reach wide audiences, you may discover that more niche shows in the early or late fringe will reach your target audience for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true as more channels and shows make television highly fragmented.

Social

Social media allows you to target ads based on various demographics and interests. Although the audience can be very precise, different demographics consume media differently. Some users may not be receptive to business related ads on Instagram, but may respond more positively on Facebook. It is also important to measure the success of different types of ads on these platforms – like display versus native. Test various platforms to see what drives results.

Third Party Information

Marketing analytics platforms such as theMarketing Measurement and Attribution Platformcan help you identify what outlets your target audiences frequent or television shows they watch. When selecting a partner, investigate how these companies identify how to reach the target audiences. Are they using outdated data or do they have media partnerships?

How to Reach your Audience at the Right Time

When marketing to today’s empowered consumers, it is not only about knowing where to reach them, but also when to reach them. As consumers become more adept at tuning messaging out, marketing in the right moment will pay dividends.

There are several important considerations to ensure right-time marketing across various channels:

Television

With the invention of DVR, viewers no longer have to sit through commercials. This means that even with the right target audience, you can’t necessarily guarantee views on commercials shown in the middle of any show’s break. When negotiating television slots, focus on either being the first commercial before a break or the last one at the end of a break. Even better is live television (including the late-night news or sporting events). Since these are live, it’s guaranteed that more people are watching at the moment rather than pressing the fast forward button.

Radio

Since listeners often switch radio stations at a commercial break, make sure to book ads at either the beginning of the break or the end if possible. Also, be sure to pay attention to DMAs (Designated Market Areas). DMAs are provided by Nielsen and are based on signal strength. For example, the Boston market also includes Rhode Island and Southern New Hampshire. It is important to keep this in mind, because although radio is a great way to reach local consumers, it may also include listeners outside your target region.

Email

When booking an eblast with an outlet, consider its timing. Fridays are a common day for people to take off, so sending an email out on a different day may increase your open rates (unless the data says otherwise).

Disadvantages of Target Audiences

Although target audiences are a great tool, marketers should remember that additional opportunities may exist in the marketplace. If bands need to reposition themselves, they may better connect with a different demographic. There may also be use cases for products that haven’t been considered. Combining target audiences with analytics tools can help identify some of these missed opportunities to further capitalize on them.

Additional Tips and Resources

• Taking an Audience Driven Approach to Creative Marketing Messaging
• What is People Based Marketing?
• How to Best Optimize Your Media Plan Across Your Brand